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The Next Web last week felt like a google glass meetup. All the tech hippies where there showcasing the latest toy from Google.

Let’s face it – this toy rox. Augmented reality has been in our minds for decades. And while head up displays have been around for a while, no one has ever managed to produce a device that got as close as google glass to becoming mass market. But they are not there yet. Set aside the price point which I’m sure will drop significantly since the bill of material is 150USD tops ( I haven’t checked the price of microdisplays in a while).

Yet as usually the challenge is not about the device, it’s about the services it will enable. I took a long close look at the Glass SDK and was pretty puzzled by how close the Glass ecosystem can be. Basically the interactions are limited to inserting “timeline” events that will display on glass and that can be bound to user’s location updates (every 10 mins or so). This sounds awesome but also very limited. I would like to be able to enrich Glass’s dictionary of voice commands to script stuff I often do online, I would like to be able to use the camera to read 1D or 2D codes and display ad1-hoc information or even better scan heads and listen to voice fingerprints to pull out the vcard and notes I have on someone … but all that can’t happen with such limited access to the system.

At this point I’m glad I didn’t throw away 1500USD on glass – set aside the brag factor I feel they’re plain useless – but I really do hope google will provide the tools to bring the device to the next stage and that it will hence be ready to bring value to the masses.

Regular folks won’t even notice this or – worse – won’t even have a clue about what it’s all about.

Today Google announced the End Of Life of google reader who’s been around 2005. For the regular folks reading me (are there any? ) Reader was a tool to syndicate all your favorite RSS feeds and manage your reading lists. The core feature from my prospective was the ability to keep track of what had been read and what had not.

It had dozens frontends aside from its own web which I rarely used, my favorites being Reeder on ios/mac and Newsrob on Android which helped me to scroll through a mass of info (several hundreds news a day in eclectic categories such as tech, venture, gadgets, drones, scuba…) and hand pick at fast pace the ones that seemed relevant to *me*.

There have been plenty of hyped products such as Flipboard or Pulse trying to reinvent the way we consume news feeds by creating a nice looking dynamic magazine. In my opinion, while those products did reach their goal in terms of design and experience it’s a complete failure in terms of posts-per-minute you can process. There’s no better tool than then user’s brain to pick  what’s relevant for him and the only way to streamline the process is to display efficiently the data he needs to decide wether he want or not to actually read a given post.

I do realize that my way of consuming news (few hundred feeds generating ~ 500 posts a day to scroll through) may be old-school but there’s no alternative solution. Twitter has ended up being a 140character dump where you can’t hope to follow all the activity, facebook is less aggressive in terms of amount of data shown but then you miss way to much stuf…

Anyway time to look for alternatives… but I guess I’ll just have to follow the existing app ecosystem and hope they’ll adjust before Reader reaches EOL… So long Google Reader !

I remember the days when thinking mobile was a real exercise where you needed to totally rethink your product so it can still being value to your users while surviving the limitations of the mobile itself:

* ridiculously small screen
* hectic Internet access
* buttons and T9 text input
* j2me or WML as sole way to display contents

Building something reasonably useful on those platforms was a real challenge while flash and HTML were already rocking the place on the desktop world.

But let’s face it, phones those days have nothing but the name in common with those dinosaurs from 10 years ago – and a few days before the MWC starts it’s time to look back and reflect on the next evolutions of the online ecosystem.

I’ll start by sharing a few bets that I’m strongly believing in:

Mobile and desktop are not 2 different platforms anymore

* while desktop has become pretty distant to native apps as it has been embracing the cloud and SAAS over the past 5 years – and while during that time the mobile has been going the exact opposing way embracing apps – I believe HTML5 is on the verge of maturity delivering a real convergent experience on any platform disregarding its aspect-ratio, available input methods or size and portability. HTML5 apps with local storage shared on the cloud between devices (as it is being added to the new versions of Chrome) will be transforming SAAS apps into rich applications running on your local virtual machine (WebKit) and leveraging on the cloud to be executed. Google is heading this way, Adobe is heading this way (after Nitobi’s acquisition ) … That was even Apple’s Jobs bet before he realized the technology wasn’t ready yet.

* Apps features will depend on the screen size / aspect ratio: not the platform. Responsive design is leapfrogging every day. While today’s implementations are mostly heavy hacks, new approaches at layout definitions are redefining the way we design the apps UX based on mandatory and optional content to show depending on the case. Mobile and desktops both face the same fragmentation challenge, and anyway the frontier between platforms is becoming more fuzzy every day.

* Mobile ads are actually wrongly labelled : they should be called in-app ads as they enable you to display rotating ads within a dynamic application which is not dependent of the reloading of pages to update its contents. And likewise geo-tagetting which seems to be only bound to mobile nowadays is also being very relevant on the desktop (although maybe a bit less precise as not relying on a GPS).

All those elements lead me to think that if you’re lucky enough to start building a service today, this is your chance to make it right from the very start. Think multi-screens, think offline and asynchronous, think MVC on the client side, think API on the backend, and build one app to serve all platforms but include the support of various rendering modes to support the various screens you’re targeting.

I’ve been an iPhone users since day 1 (literally). I’ve owned all google flagship devices since the very first one (I still miss the G1′s keyboard).

And yet – I never told anyone to buy Android. Android is brilliant, it’s Linux, it’s open, it’s easy to hack, to toy with, it has everything a geek may want, including a compiler to build your java apps straight on the device, gazillion of hooks letting apps replace stock functionalities and hence a potential far beyond iOS.

But apps on Android sucked. App developers were focused on iOS, making amazing experiences, and Android was getting the “good enough” treatment. Multiple screen sizes, a rough google play store with a complicated check out process and a poor country coverage where too much for the companies to invest on this platform as much as deserved.

Zendesk iOS

Zendesk Android

But it seems like 2012 was the year when everything turned around for Android. Incredible devices along with a more mature Android native experience got incredible powerhouses in the hand of more and more people. With a retail price less than half of the iPhones’ Android phones sure have a lot to offer (and Apple sure makes a nice margin by overpricing their phones). And after cooking and stabilizing their iOS apps, companies turned to Android and massively improved their existing apps. I recently moved back to Android, and all the apps I used to love on iOS not only are available on Android but actually do look better and are more feature-full through deeper OS integration.

Dropbox

Chessbase

Banking

So yes, if you want a new smartphone, it’s time to move to Android, it’s cheaper and better. (get a nexus 4 !)

As for the tablet, Apple built with the Newsstand something that has no Android equivalent. I love reading all the scuba magazines that get released anywhere in the world straight from it – and I’m only waiting that Google provides something equivalent to move to a Nexus 10 or nexus 7 tablet

Ok, I don’t have any stocks – I’ve been frustrated as a kid when playing with warrants, that was a casino-like experience that led me to think that stock market has little to do with the actual value of the underlying company. Anyways,

Apple has changed

We all love Apple (I’m actually a fanboy). Apple has been producing jewels that every tech kid has grown to love. No-one could resist the appeal of the first iPhones, the first iPad, or the amazing iMacs or Macbooks. All beautifully crafted products made with love that would last forever (literally, they have been my most solid pieces of tech).

For a few months now we’ve been witnessing a change. I’m not going to put it on Steve Job’s EOL, but it certainly has sped up the change.

• Product releases are now merely tech upgrades with beautiful keynotes to get them to sell. There has not been anything new for years now (aside from CPU bump, bigger screen….) and some of the key issues of the iPad such as how it can be used as a productivity device have been left unsolved.
• Quality has decreased drastically. While they pressure their subcontractors to prevent any scratch on the iPhone, the internal components are on the cheap. I just got my 3rd replacement retina Macbook Pro in 3 months, and it still has hardware issues  (the keyboard is buzzing while backlit which is a symptom for low-quality condensators inside…) (previously I had one of those LG screens with image retention and now I have a Samsung which flickers….)

I have the feeling that Apple has morphed from a company striving to build the best products to make our life easier and enable us to do more into a corporation taken over by employees only interested in the performance of their stock and less about making a change… that’s sad

Busy sunday with a chess tournament and the 20km of Paris run.

My first real chess competition ( 2h for 30 moves + 1h K.O.) … lost the game in the middle game when I thought that doubling a pawn was worth to let me keep the paca and increase pressure…. 17. d5? was a deadly mistake…. after that move it’s been a fall to hell. The opening did a great job confusing the opponent but he found the proper sequences and kept cool and was very precise in his defense, I rushed a bit too much and lost patience after 2 hrs in the game I guess, need to work on that !

20km of Paris was tougher than expected, mostly because of the heavy rain throughout the race. Shoes were soaked, I was soaked… and although I tried hard to keep the 4:30/km pace after the first half I had to slow down the pace to stabilize at a slower 5:00 and < 160bpm… killed me to not be able to keep on full speed ahead, I guess I need more trainign too (and more sleep too probably). I still finished up in 1:41:14 which is pretty decent considering the run conditions.

Last sunday was the first mini-Maker fair in France, the Open Bidouille Camp. Nice gathering for grown-ups & kids (and many grown ups acting like kids), around makerbots, mindstorm NXTs, kinexts, weird robots and even weirder servers in-a-box.Although I regretted the fat that it’s missing a few central element of the maker fair: awesome DIY kits to buy and build (on-site) as well as a hacker space to find help on personal projects (I have a couple ongoing which could have used some), this first edition was quite successful and kid made his first electrical circuits (with buzzers buzzing and lights lighting up).

Google just announced on their google maps blog that lucky Android users in France (as opposed to sad apple maps users) now have access to indoor maps in a bunch of popular venues :

Whether you use indoor maps to view the different departments of iconic French retailers like Galeries Lafayette Montparnasse, or simply to find your way to a fresh loaf of bread at the local Carrefour supermarket, Google Maps for Android can help you explore the great indoors. For a list of locations for which indoor maps are available, check out our Help Center article here.

Setting up your venue for indoor location is actually surprisingly issue, first, create and upload a floor plan, then use the Google maps floor marker app to improve location (by collecting publicly broadcast data on sample points on the floor plan)

I’ve been spending some time in the mobile ad space lately. I’m not an “ad” guy – and indeed I never see the ads on the web and just find them ugly. The only one that work on me are the retargeting ads showing me over and over again that gadget i’m trying not to buy.

Anyway back to basics… Why are brands advertising?

• Brand equity: Let’s be fair, this kind of non-ROI-based advertisement has mostly disappeared from the web. This is the kind of advertisement that was typically used at the infancy of the ad-financed Internet, when brands where paying millions to get banners all over the place, but that would not lead to any actual money earned…. only brand equity
• ROI-based ads: Getting a qualified email, making someone buy a product… all those actions are creating tangible value for the brands, hence giving them the ability to actually earn money from spending money on advertisement. Since the crisis kinda cut out any negative-ROI budgets, those ads are what brands are going for.

On the web, it’s pretty easy to earn money from an ad-recruited user

• e-commerce => direct tangible money
• sign-up & email acquisition => acquisition cost vs long-term customer value
• Fan/follower acquisition : like the previous point but … well.. even harder to properly transform into an actual user/ customer

Now back to mobile. Life is way tougher here:

• m-commerce: in 2011 it was accountable for 0.7% of total sales in 2011 (6.7B vs 188.1B)
• acquisition: way harder than on the web, sign-up processes are hell, typing is hell, screen size is smaller and acquiring a customer is tougher. Even fan/follower acquisition with is an integrated experience is harder. Facebook’s latest iteration enhanced that greatly though.
• Connexion: although everyone brags about their N-G network, white areas are still legion and even in dense city it may be hard to get a decent connexion

The main ways to sell something on the mobile at the moment are through the various stores (app sales, content sales…). I personally never click on ads as navigation being not as fluid as on the web I’m always pissed when I’m being moved away from the page / app I’m currently using.

The mobile puzzles adds a few pieces though to the web one

• Location – less on iOS now – but fully on Android & co – being able to channel a mobile user to a physical point of sales as YOOSE is doing makes a lot of sense.
• m-payment – wether you believe this makes any sense at all, m-payment is coming with a pile of solutions, from credit-card picture snapping, to square and paypal mobile or m-banking, you actually have plenty options to use your smartphone to pay.

Now just like Facebook has explained a gazillion times in their IPO documents, Media consumption is shifting massively from the web to mobile.

But this shift is way ahead of proper solutions to monetize the media as the mobile ad puzzle will remain incomplete as long as there’s no easy way to acquire a customer or perform a quick sale.

Bottom line, this market is amazing:

• Huge potential for progression
• New technical challenges (proper location-based campaign management at the web-scale has real technical challenges)

And although fortunes have already been done on the mobile ad market (such as the admob sale to google for 750M$ back in 2009) turns out they only scratched the tip of the iceberg.

A few techniques I shared on Diveboard – if you too are a heavy breather, you should check them out! Turns out breathing is not something natural and needs to be learned / tuned.