Three random updates: Bing, iPhones, and Dropbox

On Microsoft’s Bing what’s new in web search: By all accounts, Microsoft has a success with its re-crafted bing search site. I posted something about it mainly to say, competition can re-emerge even in a market as dominated as web search. With the follow-on Microsoft-Yahoo deal, bing on TV, and all the rest, bing + Yahoo + related now can claim almost third of the search marketplace to google’s almost two thirds, with others nestled in there in single digits.

How good is bing? Or, how good is it for you? Here is a great site for doing a “blind taste test” style search comparison among google, bing and yahoo. http://blindsearch.fejus.com/. Its beta, but it’s fun.

On Apple and the hole it is digging for itself by stridently controlling iPhone software: I wrote about this on idealware recently. The iPhone App Store saga has really emerged as a major business news story for the summer. Apple finally conceded a more standard version of Gmail for the iPhone (one with email push out to the phone). The fact that these developments are covered like the daily sports says a lot. Here is a great run-down of some of the reaction to Apple’s brinksmanship on the iPhone.

The stickiness of this story reflects an important development of wider significance. Having changed the game in audio and mobile devices, consumers expect more and different of it. Sure, part of it is pressure to be more responsive on price. What is really fascinating is how much the pressure is about being more open, as in open source/open content. Compared to the beginning of this decade, having great design is not enough.

We are really in a new era in which “pure” Open Source software has given way to much more of a continuum between being completely closed, proprietary, license-driven and being completely open. And Apple is catching it as much as Microsoft, Oracle and other hold-outs of the last decade. Its about as likely that iTunes be open sourced as Windows, yet the issues of intellectual property, “walled gardens” of controlled add-ons, DRM and so on have become part of much wider social awareness and consumer thinking. This is a good thing for software and technology development generally.

On drop box. When I wrote about dropbox last spring, I really was just looking for something to keep home and work computers in sync. Start with a free Dropbox account and create folders on Windows, Mac or Linux computers (including servers) that will dynamically sync the files, simple as that. I am seeing now just how useful Dropbox really is.

First, it offers another piece in the project management, project planning puzzle. You can share a sub-folder of your drop box with a project team for working collaborative on documents. You can do this in a larger way with Basecamp, Sharepoint, Microsoft Office Live, a Google site and others. What’s nice about Dropbox is that setting up the sharing is really light-weight and easy where collaboration is short-term, project-specific, and not particularly staff-based. It is easy and free to get an account, and it only takes a minute to share out a folder for a team. You are still working in your standard desktop office applications. Yes, the documents are on their server, so there is that Web 2.0 trust factor, but they are also always on your computer. And the web interface includes revisions and other features in simple format.

The other thing I have been thinking about with dropbox is drop box as a full back-up alternative. The free version allows 2 GB of storage. If that doesn’t cover your current, active documents and more, then you lead a different life than me. Moving up, the price for 50GB and beyond, and is more than, say, Mozy or Cabonite, but reasonable enough to consider using it to back up everything. I don’t think I would even true to have it back-up Exchange Server, but I have been playing around with ways to ensure it will back-up active shared files (such as a database). Check it out at getdropbox.com or use this link, and yes, help me get even more storage free! https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTU4MjExMTk.

Dropbox seems like an ambitious small company. Hope they survive.

Why you should care about iPhone jailbreakers

The Electronic Freedom Foundation wants you to be able to load and run any software you want on your new iPhone, or any other smartphone for that matter. It’s your phone, and your risk, the EFF argued with the US Copyright office last year.

Jailbreakers install software and modify the iPhone so that iPhones can run software not necessarily sold directly by Apple. Apple’s earlier arguments focused mainly on the risk of breaking the phone, making it unserviceable and so on. That argument lost credibility when an estimated 2.3 Million iPhone users so far have taken this step without much sign of harm. Apple also argued that jailbreakers violate Apple’s intellectual property and the DCMA by so doing.

Of course, you can install anything written for the Mac whether purchased at an Apple store or not without violating Apple’s intellectual property. Not so iPhone games or utilities. Either buy directly from Apple or you have broken federal law, according to Apple attorneys. Jonathan Zittrain of the Berkman Center at Harvard Law School explores the effect of these kinds of policies on innovation and creativity in his excellent, “The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It.”

With the support of the Mozilla Foundation (maker of Firefox) and other technology companies, the EFF filed legal motions saying owners should be able to install software outside of the App Stores without violating the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).

According to press reports, Apple now claims that “jailbreaking” an iPhone could lead to the crashing of cell phone towers, adding and abetting drug dealers, and even threats to national security. Yikes!

It is hard not to chuckle when reading the news reports of dire threats to our infrastructure and security from owners installing things Apple has ruled off of its App Store. There are lots easier ways to use cell phones anonymously than jailbreaking an expensive iPhone. (Just watch HBO’s the Wire).

Yes, Apple is entitled to preserve the success and profitability of its App Store. And yes, it is entitled to do what it can to enforce its exclusive marketing agreement in the US with AT&T. We should just recognize these for what they are.

Apple and AT&T for example have refused so far to let iPhone users in the United States install software that will let you use the iPhone as a modem for your laptop. Using a cell phone in this way comes in handy when you don’t have a free WIFI signal. I have done it regularly with my Nokia E71, and before that my E62, on my AT&T account. So we know it’s not a technological limitation of the AT&T network. And new edition iPhone users in other countries can use their phones in this way. So it’s also not a limitation of the phone. It’s a business decision between Apple and AT&T.

Likewise, Apple has also blocked use of Google Voice on iPhones. (I hope to explore Google Voice in another column). It even retroactively removed a utility called Voice Central previously approved that enabled iPhone users to integrate Google Voice.

So far as I can tell, both these moves are partly about protecting AT&T while it slowly upgrades its infrastructure—and figures out a premium price! Yet it is also seems partly to blunt competition by keeping rival services off the iPhone.

Whether or not you use an IPhone or other smart phonex, if you work with technology or advise others on it, these issues matter. Our work succeeds when organizations can exercise choice about their systems and software, when issues of intellectual property and licensing are out on the table, and where organizations and consultants preserve long run ability to modify and adapt the technology they invest in.

The mobile technology world, along with showing the power of innovation, also shows the fragility of intellectual creativity at the hands of the major carriers, phone makers, and commercial technology giants generally.

Looking at the mobile technology world, it’s easy to be dazzled by the pace of change. Even when we think ourselves pretty sophisticated, it’s easy to imagine that free market competition serves social progress.

In the first half of 2009, we have seen quite a wave of cell phone innovation. We have the new Apple iPhone 3Gs from AT&T, Palm Pre at Sprint, new Google Android myTouch no at T-Mobile , Blackberry Storm touch screen at Verizon--and Nokia 5800 and amazing N97 if you happen to live outside the United States. The power of new smart cell phones and mobile software is changing what we use for our daily on-line business and fun, from email to search.

From a global point of view, the prevalence of mobile technology, even if the phones carry a premium price, tends to reduce the gap between those who live or work in countries with extensive broadband Internet access and the bulk of the world who does not. Cell phone access is more pervasive than DSL or cable. Mobile tech also lessens the gap between those with full bore desktops and laptops at home and those who need to rely on their phone. Taking the T (public transit) in Boston, it is remarkable how many teens have Sidekicks or other youth-marketed phones with keyboards for communication.

The battle over the restrictiveness of Apple’s App Store and exclusive agreement with AT&T in the US, which has now reached the attention of Congress, shows the limitations of corporate driven innovation. I don’t mean to pick on Apple here. The fact that Blackberry offers different styled and featured models for each of the carriers it works with is another example of the same issue. The Google Android phone software will only reach its full potential when it too becomes more entirely available. Nokia’s limited presence in the US yet dominance in edgy emerging markets in China, India and elsewhere reflects deal-making.

The gap between the wireless technology used by AT&T and Verizon (with others lining up on one side or the other) is pretty much unparalleled in the rest of the world. It would be as if your TV could only work on signals from cable or DSL but not both.

The mobile industry appears to be a huge arena of innovation in the US. Yet, it also exemplifies the power of lobbying and business alliances to hold back the pace of change and the public interest. So, in addition to affecting personal choices about your phone, look at these conflicts over the openness of the iPhone and related battles as skirmishes over what will really drive innovation and creativity in technology in the years ahead. The EFF and the Berkman Centre and others are on to something.