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This famous ship sailed the seven seas for years and years. It rode the waves up and down, and often seemed like it will capsize, but it managed to survive. The ship’s crew has long lost hope of finding the promised land, depressingly they pressed on, forgetting why they embarked on this voyage to begin with. And worse yet, their captain lost all hope as well, misguidedly he just stood on the lookout, blankly staring onto the endless sea

No, I am not getting into publishing Children’s Books, though maybe I should, since new iBooks Author makes it easy. Instead, this post is all about the venerable Marketplace, the tough competition and the Innovator’s Dilemma.

I wanted to weigh in on RIM’s situation, after reading about Mr. Heins trying to defend himself and his company. Granted, RIM really was an innovator back in a day, with their breakthrough platform for routing emails, internet and other information we care about – directly to our mobile devices. Today, however, that is a bygone conclusion – a feature that everyone expects as Standard right now.

Apple outplayed them (and pretty much everyone) by focusing on User Experience. I really believe they were the first to realize that good user experience starts with Presentation, and they invested to bring Top Notch graphics into mobile devices. They also realized that Battery Life is critical – a cell phone without power is a paper-weight.

But how does one innovate? Start by reading latest Sci-Fi, then ask yourself – why is this fiction? Maybe it is Seth Godin’s Poke the Box influence on me, a book I am enjoying this week, but I really want to give some tips for once-mighty RIM. Being a Me-Too is a tough place to be – especially in the current marketplace. With three mighty companies there (Apple, Google and Microsoft), and with biggest decision point for consumers (all else being similar) is focused on Overall Experience and Apps Ecosystem.

Innovation is all about revolution and radical jumps forward, not small incremental improvements. Alas, did you know that Large Jumps Forwards are HARD?! I say RIM should focus All Their Resources on Radical, on Revolutionary, on Rethinking. And maybe I don’t see it, but bringing us yet another operating system (or platform on top of *NIX) is just a Large Waste of Resources. Those talented people should be focused on revolutionizing every other aspect of the mobile experience, and leave the base platform alone, to leverage existing ecosphere of Apps.

I was going to title this post “The Exciting Adventures of the Brave Me-2 Ship”, but you know what, being a Me-2 is never exciting nor brave…

Forgive the loud title of this post, but I promise that it is totally relevant! For the past few weeks I have tremendously enjoyed several audio-books from my local library. Our local Gwinnett county library had Digital Downloads for a long time via OverDrive Media Console. However, the big breakthrough is my discovering that they are offering iPhone App!

Actually, the Media Console client software is also for Android, Blackberry and it even works on iPad 2 ! This is most likely US only (sorry International friends), and probably not all local libraries offer it, though I hear very high percentage do.

Pretty simple to use – just look up your county’s library and login via your mobile device’s browser, using your library card. Then select latest blockbuster eBook or Audio Book in your favorite category, and click Download! Voila, it should download and be available for you to enjoy in seconds! Although, having selected long Audio Book myself, I had to wait until I was in Wi-Fi zone to be able to download it. It works just like any other Library material, in that it will expire within 14 days (or whatever your library designated). No need to “return” anything to the library, it will just disappear off your device.

I started off with absolute classic 1984 by George Orwell, which I enjoyed even more than expected. Then, I continued onto modern fiasco tale in All The Devils Are Here – The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis.  Ironically this “other side of the coin” book seems most appropriate to me, and will undoubtedly stimulate my further exploration into alternative structures for society next.

Did I mention that OverDrive Media Console is Absolutely Free? I haven’t checked on all platforms, but I can confirm that it is free on iPhone, Android and Windows. Enjoy!

PS: I read that some libraries offer Audio Books in WMA format – these won’t play on iPhone (not sure about Android), but can be enjoyed on your Windows PC. Just glance at Audio Book format which should be listed on your library’s Audio Book page, before the download.

Adobe Flash Platform got some bad press lately, and its exclusion from iPad is a major slap in the face to Adobe by Steve Jobs himself. Even though millions of sites out there (including this one) use Flash to liven up things and provide extra interactivity, Apple is willing to leave users to stare at Big Empty Boxes on iPad, rather than add Flash support.

To be fair, I myself did a lot of Flash/Flex development and still do! I really like what ActionScript can achieve, much more so than messing with JavaScript and CSS/HTML. But, times are tough, so here is my proposal:

How about we setup an Open Source project to build Flash alternative based on Dalvik VM and some existing Android platform components. We already know that it’s very capable, and if Google is true to its mantra, they wouldn’t mind sharing! Why not reuse the great UI library and 3D API’s, and others, and bring them into the browsers on all platforms – Windows, Unix and of course, Mac and iPad/iPhone! Can’t we all just get along?! Plus with JIT for Dalvik, and potential for native hardware video acceleration on Windows/Mac/Ubuntu/Handsets, I see very bright future!

I am not ignoring Silverlight or HTML 5, I just don’t see either as viable solution. Silverlight is still proprietary and you need specific Microsoft tools to develop for it, while HTML 5 feels like a bit “future-ware” and even when materializes, it’s unclear that it can provide all the richness of visual effects, 3D support, overall speed and pixel level manipulation which we expect in this day and age.

But what about JavaFX you ask? Feels like DOA to me, sadly. I love Java, which is yet another reason why I think Android approach is great, but JavaFX is just “overweight” out the door, and many posted about other major shortcomings.

Plus true modularity is still not there with neither technology! Why are we (developers) still forcing users to go through complex installation ritual to get new software on a system? Why does it have to be a gamble, especially when installing complex applications, whether it will interfere with other applications on the system and break things?!

So, I want to see comments! I know it’s rather big project, so without some people weighing in as to it’s merit (or with offers of participation), I am not going to bother starting even. Besides, probably Googlers are already doing it, whether in their 20% or even as main task, who knows…

UPDATE: I just discovered that someone implemented Flash player in JavaScript!? I didn’t think it was possible, but it is seemingly done using HTML5 browser features in modern browsers. More details and browsers compatibility list on the Gordon project on Github.

I just couldn’t resist the title, it’s just too funny. But on a serious note, Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform is in serious trouble. Rumors flamed up again about Microsoft making their own MS branded hardware device, presumably with Zune functionality built in.

In my opinion Microsoft really can’t blame the OEM’s this time (like they tried with the Media Player Plays-for-sure fiasco) and “Come Out with their own Phone-Done-Right device”. I think OEM’s tried as hard as they could, over the last few years, to Make Windows Mobile Work. They developed their own additions and enhancements to the Windows Mobile, trying desperately to “prop-up” the ailing platform. But, no luck thus far – Today I can’t recommend any of the Windows Mobile smartphones, after experiencing the iPhone and RIM’s offerings…

I think it is really a combination of issues, from the slow display drivers/response (bad for UI overall, especially video and navigation), to seriously lacking Internet browser (where is their Deepfish?). But the biggest issue of all, ironically, is their openness, allowing problematic plugins (that consume CPU and Memory) to run on the Phone’s front page and allowing the many programs to run in the background, slowing phone down to a crawl. I say Ironically, because this is the biggest thing that iPhone disallows – only single running application and very controlled “3rd party software”. Of course it is also biggest complaint about the iPhone, since we can’t have our “gTalk” running in the background for people to reach us, which seriously cripples the usefulness of the whole “Unlimited Data Plan”.

Meanwhile, Android to the Rescue! Yea, more on that to come, stay tuned!