Linkbait 29

Three weeks since the last one. It’s conference season.

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• If you’re a web developer, please take the A List Apart Survey 2011. It’ll help us make sense of our industry.
• CSS prefixes are discussed again. Henri Sivonen argues against them; Daniel Glazman argues against Henri.
  To me the crucial point is this (Henri):

  WebKit currently has near-monopoly market share among mobile browsers [...]. In such a monoculture situation, it is no wonder that mobile-oriented Web sites put their effort into [...] using -webkit-CSS, this leads to lock-in.

  and this (Daniel):

  The rule should be this one: if the CSS parser encounters a prefixed property for another browser, honour that property as if it were prefixed for us UNLESS an unprefixed or prefixed for us valid declaration for that property was already set.

  Instinctively I want to get rid of CSS prefixes, but the arguments in their favour are just too compelling.
• Vasilis van Gemert switched The Daily Nerd to English. Follow it if you want something Linkbait-like, but daily, and with less mobile and more desktop.
• Solid overview of current techniques for adapting your website’s content to mobile.
• I found out only today that the Sencha team maintains an excellent set of browser tests, most of them mobile. Good reading!
• Luke Wroblewski maintains that the Web OS is already here. “The Web (browser) is inside of every application instead of every application being inside the Web (browser).” I read somewhere else that 8 out of the 10 most popular apps in the Apple App Store already use the browser (well, WebView) to render parts of their content. That’s what Luke means.
• Josh Clark gave an excellent talk in New York about the 7 myths of mobile web design. The Next Web summarises.
• Things got official: Sony and Ericsson divorce, with Sony taking the business and Ericsson the cash.
  Wonder what kind of phones Sony will make. Android for now, but what about the new year?
• HTC sold enough phones in Q3, but is expecting problems in Q4. (It could also be setting low expectations for Q4, only to beat them handsomely.)
• And LG is raising cash to maintain its phone business. Not going well.
• Good overview of where RIM stands now. They need to change their proprietary networking technology to TCP/IP. A proprietary solution was an excellent idea 10 years ago, but is outdated today. On the plus side, RIM still has a considerable revenue stream from its enterprise clients; a revenue stream, moreover, that’s predictable and independent of current sales.
• Oracle to acquire webOS? I surely hope not. Would be about the worst possible choice.
• Then again, brand-new CEO Whitman feels it’s more important to take the right decision than the fast decision. She has a point, but HP’s dithering upsets the entire post-Android market and it should take a bloody decision anyway, especially since the only three choices are licensing, outright sale, or throwing it away. Sale continues to be my preferred solution.
• Especially since HP laid off about 500 Palm engineers — as far as I know on the hardware side, and not on the software side. Thus restarting hardware production is not an option any more. Besides, they’d be laughed out of the market. There’s only so many times you can repeat the same mistakes.
• GigaOM has a nice summary of where HP stands nowadays with webOS. Summary: mostly doom and gloom, unless the company gets its act together and does something.
• What about the Nokia Windows Phones? A Telefonica official says they’re “not yet at the right price point.” Could be negotiation tactics; could be genuine worry.
• Speaking of Microsoft, Silverlight will likely disappear as a plugin, but its programming environment will live on for Windows 8/Metro apps. And Windows Phone as well.
• A good Kindle Fire review. The most interesting part is about the Silk browser, which doesn’t seem to be very fast. Seems Amazon has copied the Android WebKit browser, which is not very good. So let’s count Silk as Android 3 for the moment, including all the problems.
• That huge North Carolina data centre Apple’s using? It’ll run on solar energy because Apple is not to be out-greened by Google and Facebook.
• Speaking of Apple, it seems Steve Jobs wanted his own mobile network. In itself this doesn’t surprise me; I always thought Apple and Google will eventually try something in the mobile connectivity space. Still, it seems Jobs studied the idea from 2005 to 2007 before giving it up.
  The problem here is that you either have to build your own network, in the sense of setting up cell towers, or lease part of the network of other operators. So either spend a wagonload of money, or put your fate in the hands of your competitors. A wifi-only solutions such as Jobs was contemplating simply isn’t going to work.
• Kenyans now send more money locally through the SMS-based M-PESA service than Western Union sends worldwide. Mobile banking ftw!
• PayPal enters the NFC payments market. Still, I’m not sure how you get your money onto the phone. If that requires a credit card the PayPal initiative won’t reach most of the world population, such as the Kenyans.
• And work is being done on integrating NFC in a SIM card. That’s a requirement for direct SIM-to-SIM payments that work on any phone.
• And RIM uses NFC to make their phones a security pass.
• The Next Web did some number crunching and found out that the upcoming Kindle Fire is nearly powerful enough to run Windows 8. Windows 8 requirements are a lot lower than Windows 7 requirements, because Microsoft wants to make the jump to mobile and tablets. Good thinking.
  Still, the fact that the new Kindle is almost powerful enough, and runs Android, means that eventually Windows 8 may be lighter than Android. Who’d’ve thunk it?
• Dean Bubley discusses payment APIs:

  Although the "balance of payments" for APIs may be negative in the short term (ie telcos paying more money to Internet companies than they get in return), that's not necessarily worrying.

  Firstly, operators need to show that they "get" the whole API / web-services / mashup philosophy. [...]

  Secondly, operators should be using Web APIs for the same reason as everyone else - they help lower costs, improve time-to-market and add new and innovative features that improve the value of their own services.[...]

  Lastly, gaining greater experience with buying APIs should also yield a lot more insight into how to market, price, bill and support them, when they move into the API sales arena.

• Google removed all sharing from Google Reader. Now personally I didn’t even notice, but it turns out this can be quite a problem for users in Iran or other countries where the government is not into free knowledge sharing.
• Once more: SMS is the killer app for global health care.
• A who owes who of Europe. Flash.

• As Syria’s crackdown on protests has claimed more than 3,000 lives since March, Italian technicians in telecom offices from Damascus to Aleppo have been busy equipping President Bashar al-Assad’s regime with the power to intercept, scan and catalog virtually every e-mail that flows through the country.

  The dark side of the Web.
• Auto-wiping sensitive data on your phone dependent on your location? Check.
• Einstein’s theory of relativity in words of four letters or less.
• And by 2012, it will comprise 75% of all online and mobile content.
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