Startable – Healy Jones’ & Prasad Thammineni’s Blog

As Amazon announced their new tablets they also mentioned a new browser they had built – Amazon Silk. Silk promises to be the fastest browser ever, especially on a mobile device, because it uses Amazon’s cloud services to do a lot of the backend computing. In other words, your little tablet won’t have to do a lot of requests over the network and then work some computationally (sort of) difficult stuff to render web pages as you browse using Silk.

It’s an interesting idea, and one that is described pretty well in this video by Amazon:

Amazon Silk Video

What Silk Means

So why is Amazon, a company that now sells devices, trying to make the workload on your device less? I mean, shouldn’t they want to follow Apple’s iCloud strategy and push the compute to the device so people feel like they need to buy a new one every year as it gets slower and slower?? Why pay all that money for compute costs in the cloud (OK, it’s not that expensive for Amazon since they own the cloud, but still, it’s not free)?

DATA

I was going to spend the time writing up how brilliant this was – but Chris Espinosa has already written it better than I ever could; check out his post on the topic:

The “split browser” notion is that Amazon will use its EC2 back end to pre-cache user web browsing, using its fat back-end pipes to grab all the web content at once so the lightweight Fire-based browser has to only download one simple stream from Amazon’s servers. But what this means is that Amazon will capture and control every Web transaction performed by Fire users. Every page they see, every link they follow, every click they make, every ad they see is going to be intermediated by one of the largest server farms on the planet. People who cringe at the data-mining implications of the Facebook Timeline ought to be just floored by the magnitude of Amazon’s opportunity here. Amazon now has what every storefront lusts for: the knowledge of what other stores your customers are shopping in and what prices they’re being offered there. What’s more, Amazon is getting this not by expensive, proactive scraping the Web, like Google has to do; they’re getting it passively by offering a simple caching service, and letting Fire users do the hard work of crawling the Web. In essence the Fire user base is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, scraping the Web for free and providing Amazon with the most valuable cache of user behavior in existence.

It’s awesome. And for sure worth the expense.

Now they just have to get people using the browser! I’m excited to try it out…

Finally, a funny:

Check out the recommended videos alongside the Amazon Silk Video

If I thought Google was smarter I’d think they’d put there there on purpose!

Tablet growth is going gangbusters! Bizrate Insights has a new report that shows tablet growth at a 51% CAGR for the next few years (I can’t find the piece, just a write up on online marketing trends here.) A slightly more dated chart shows how fast tablets are taking off:

Online Marketing Tends reports that:

“According to a new report by Forrester Research, in partnership with Bizrate Insights, the number of Americans owning tablet devices is forecast to increase at a compound annual growth rate of 51% between 2010 and 2015, while tablet commerce is expected to grow rapidly over the same period. 9% of surveyed online shoppers say they own a tablet device; among them, 78% own a smartphone as well, while 22% of tablet owners (2% of online shoppers) own a tablet only.”

That’s pretty quick. I’m starting to believe that the future will be dominated by tablets, at least as far as small business usage goes. And looks like Prasad Thammenini, my intrepid sometimes co-blogger, agrees. Here he is with a nifty new iPad2 keyboard that he just purchased:

Microsoft Office 365 launches tomorrow, and now that I see the marketing video I think that the Skype acquisition makes a lot more sense.

Microsoft Office 365 Video

My big question is how open with Office 365 be? Will outside developers be able to write to and interact with all the Office services? I get the feeling MSFT is trying to do everything – file sharing, collaboration, cloud content management & storage, webinar hosting… it’s a lot. I can’t imagine all of it will be best of breed. So many customers will likely want to supplement weaker offerings with outside developed programs. If MSFT if open they may lose a little revenue, but will likely actually grow the pie and increase stickiness… we’ll see how this plays out.

Wow, Google is ready to move people to updated browsers! This is great for the online world, and will hopefully get people off of ancient browsers like IE6 and whatnot.

According to multiple Google blogs:

For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers… Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.
For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version.
As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. In these older browsers you may have trouble using certain features in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Talk, Google Docs and Google Sites, and eventually these apps may stop working entirely.

This is pretty kick butt. It’s time to get people off of older browsers. Supporting old school browsers is a tremendous pain for online services like OfficeDrop. Hopefully the 80 billion users of Google products will upgrade. I wonder what percent of Google users are early adopters who are already using the most updated versions vs the general internet population using outdated browsers. Only 2% of OfficeDrops cloud content management visitors are on IE6, for example. I wonder what it is for the GOOG.

A couple of good links, one by me and one by Scott Orn of Lighthouse Capital.

Good Ideas are Never Lonely

Don’t let the fact that there is competition deter you from starting your company. Scott talks about how he beats the competition with his non-funded, not for profit social network Ben’s Friends. Very cool post. Good ideas are Never Lonely.

Don’t Let Old Content Go To Waste

I wrote this post for DIY Marketers – don’t let old blog content go to waste! You can get both SEO love and qualified traffic from highly visited and page ranked older blog posts. This is one way to do it.

There are two reports out today, one about RIMs recent disappointing quarter and one predicting that Apple will have a billion-quintillion dollars in revenue in a couple of years.

I think the difference boils down to apps. Apple like apps. RIM doesn’t think they are the future.

But it doesn’t really matter what the companies want, what matters is what consumers want. And consumers want apps. The Yankee Group’s research says “We now expect that U.S. consumers will download almost 1.6 billion apps in 2010, and that those numbers will swell to more than 6 billion by 2014. Even more impressive, paid app revenue will swell from $1.6 billion this year to more than $11 billion in 2014.”

I still think Wired was right, the web is dead. Apps are the way to go.

I was a little surprised to read today that Firefox took the lead market share for browsers in Europe. But it seems that IE is actually losing out to Chrome and Firefox is now the winner not because of growth but because of IE’s drop.

In December, the open-source Firefox took 38.1 percent of European market share, while Internet Explorer’s share slipped to 37.5 percent. Google (GOOG.O) Chrome saw its share rising to 14.6 percent from just 5.1 percent a year earlier.

Learn more on Reuters.

It’s funny to think that anti-trust actions in Europe are benefiting Google’s Chrome at Microsoft’s expense. Looks like the government in Europe is a little behind the times, attacking the company on its heels and giving a little boost to the new big kid on the block.

eMarketer is predicting that online advertising spend will be bigger than newspaper advertising in 2011. Too bad most of that is search and isn’t the type of $ that directly subsidizes good content…

A CNN piece alerted me to a Pew Research study on the penetration of checkin apps, and claimed that only 4% of people in the US have actually used a checkin app.

I’ve been thinking about checkin apps for a while, mainly because I’m slowly using Foursquare less and less as time goes by. I’m finding it slow (although I think my ancient iPhone is part of the problem), that it doesn’t really fit into my workflow (i.e. my friends and wife think it’s annoying that I always have to pull out my phone whenever I go into any store) and to be totally honest, am not getting enough utility out of it anymore.

I was worried that this study was going to only include landline phones, but they somehow included cell phone users in the study. (see my older piece on landlines vs. cellular congestion). So there could be some interesting data in the piece.

Here is some cool information from the survey:

24% of online adults use Twitter or another service to share updates about themselves or to see updates about others. Ten percent of these status update site users use a location-based service, over twice the rate of the general online population.

twitter penetration

The other chart I found interesting shows a funny barbell in terms of education – less educated and more educated people checking more often (note this is not statistically significant but I’ll pretend that it is.) And middle of the road income people checkin more than higher income people – but again, not stats significant and may be a function of the age – younger people also make less $ so this may be the cause.

% of people who checkin by demo

Anyways, cool research by the Pew people.

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OfficeDrop co-founder Anand Rajaram has posted his second piece on Performable’s blog about how OfficeDrop used user testing during our site redesign to increase our site’s conversion numbers.