Everything and the Mobile Software Universe…

So TAT made me wow! again :

I’m not sure real eye tracking is used there, perhaps only the iPhone accelerometer, but the results is stunning, even if I’m not sure of what it brings on a little screen.

The idea come from this amazing guy: 2 leds and a Wiimote, watch the end of the video, and on such a big screen, this makes sense, enjoy

[here is a good recap/introduction about Graphical Processors, thanks Sylvain!]

In the desktop computing world, at the beginning, there were 3D graphical hardware accelerators which handled the fixed functionality provided by graphic libraries (either hardware vendor proprietary library or standard library like OpenGL and DirectX). The first generation of accelerators handled geometric primitives (triangle, quad, line, point) rasterization and texturing. Newer generation added hardware implementation for the complete graphical pipeline with geometric computation for 3D coordinates transformation and lighting.

Then, with the addition of the support for shading languages, graphical accelerators offered programmable steps in the graphical pipeline. It means that where older accelerators completely handled the color of each rendered pixel of a primitive, accelerators with programmable shader offer the possibility to write shader code that is executed on the GPU and which can control the rendering of each pixel of a primitive.

Support for shading languages is the feature that enabled General Purpose computing on the Graphical Processing Unit. Indeed, GPU are designed to perform tons of geometric computation on vectors. Vectors are used to represent geometric coordinates as well as colors. GPU also have very high data bandwidth compared to the CPU, so they can fetch texture and geometric data very fast.

This computing power was made available on nVidia hardware with the Cuda language which enables to write C code (with some restrictions) that is compiled for the GPU. This page presents some applications that run on the GPU with Cuda:http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home.html

Recently, AMD released its Stream SDK which is a technology comparable to Cuda but for ATI hardware. This SDK includes a video converter application: Avivo, which is said to run 13 times faster on the GPU. At the same time, the Khronos group released the first official specifications of OpenCL, a library to program GP-GPU that is not tied to any GPU vendor. NVidia already announced they will provide an OpenCL implementation alongside their Cuda SDK. We can certainly bet AMD will also support OpenCL soon.

The OpenCL standard interface opens the door to significant optimization in a large range of applications by provide access to the GPU’s processing power. Not all applications because general-purpose is not, actually, all-purpose. GPU are efficient for specific kind of tasks. They are most useful for problems which involve big amount of data that can be processed in parallel. We will not see soon or late a compiler which runs on a GPU, but relevant applications could easily perform computation on GPU thanks to OpenCL, just the same way they currently make use of SIMD extensions available from the CPU like SSE. Apple is integrating OpenCL in MacOS X just right now.

In the embedded computing world, fixed functionality GPU accelerators are now present in most of the smartphones. For example iPhone includes a PowerVR MBX core licensed by Imagination Technologies which support OpenGL ES 1.1. Regarding graphical power this chipset is where desktop computers were a few years ago. There already exists chipsets which support OpenGL ES 2.0. Those graphical chipsets do include programmable shaders and enable GP-GPU programming on embedded devices just like GPU in desktops.

[Cloud Computing is the new buzzword, blogger Thomas Menguy tries to decipher its underlying concepts, the main actors, the business models and the implications for the industry ].

Cloud Computing is everywhere, and begins to look like the next big thing. But the term seems to regroup a plethora of new and old concepts with no clear consensus about it: everybody seems to understand what it is but when asked, having a clear definition is not so easy (I know, I’ve tried recently…and miserably failed ). Here is my attempt to give it some sense.

I’ll begin with some quotes grabbed from this nice video from the web2.0 expo

Everything that we think of as a computer today is really just just a device that connect to the big computer we are all collectively building…Cloud computing : how computing services will be delivered in the future

Tim O’Reilly

Chance for developer to no worry about "things" …business concerns, scaling concerns

Matt Mullenweg (Wordpress Co-founder)

A way to deliver services rather than applications completely independent of platform completely independent of physical hardware and I hope it works.

Vamshi Krishna Mokshagundam

Ok, so to sum up those gurus’ words, cloud computing seems to be about:

• Software Services deployment
• Transparent scaling of those services
• Reliability (no down time worry)
• Monetization handling
• Decorrelate the software from the physical hardware it is running on

After this helicopter view, we can try to be a little be more educated, reading this excellent article from ExplainingComputers about the cloud may help:

It describes a very good metaphor for all this cloud stuff:

In his book The Big Switch, Nicholas Carr compares the growth of cloud computing to the development of the electricity network around a century ago. Before that time businesses had to generate their own power and therefore had to choose their location based on the available means of generation, such as moving water to drive a wheel or a supply of coal. However, with the availability of a reliable electricity grid to which they could connect, firms were increasingly freed from such constraints to focus on the other aspects of their business.

In exactly the same manner we are today just about entering an age in which both individuals and organizations will be able to dispense with a large home computer or corporate data centre, and instead connect far leaner computing devices to cloud computing resources that will fuel their information processing requirements. It is therefore hardly surprising that cloud computing is also being referred to as "grid computing" or "utility computing"

ExplainingComputers about the cloud:

What a paradigm shift! Computing power data storage and services will soon be outsourced to 3rd parties.

Now getting back to the industry, Cloud computing seems to be the sum of two concepts

Software as a Service, or SaaS, perhaps you know it under another name : web 2.0

It can be described as desktop like application accessed within the browser (or a  RDA technology like AIR) and where the storage/processing is on dedicated servers.

Those services can be free or not, here are some notable examples:

• http://www.salesforce.com/ : CRM for marketing/sales, per user monthly fee (9$ to 65$ a month)
• The excellent http://zoho.com free for personal use then few bucks per month/per user for business
• http://www.clarizen.com/ : project management software, per user monthly fee (around 20$ to 40$)
• Even IBM is going this route with https://www.lotuslive.com/ a kind of hosted Lotus service (I can’t get prices…)
• Of course : http://docs.google.com/ to store/share/edit office documents, free but has a paid version for enterprise. Of course Gmail is there also as Google web album (price depend on storage)
• Adobe plays the game with https://www.photoshop.com/ a kind of “online” Photoshop elements to store share and edit your personal photos, free for simple use, from 19$ to 129$ a year to grow the storage, different services are proposed if you already own Photoshop elements or premiere elements. Adobe also provides an office online collaborative suite: https://www.acrobat.com/ free to use, but acrobat desktop is heavily advertized across the tool.
• Apple MobileMe for photos, mail, events contact calendar shared between desktop and mobile (iphone) 99$ a year.
• Microsoft answer to Apple: SkyBox/SkyLine/SkyMarket (MobileMe+Appstore for WinMob). Microsoft has also some offers, around Microsoft live, http://home.live.com/, and some plan for hosted exchange services, I don’t have any price point to compare it to “standard” Exchange installations

Of course I forget a lot of others, like Flickr, yahoo! services, etc.

All those services have in common:

• Ease of use, not only for the service itself, but also for billing, maintenance, installation, deployment, etc.
• Affordable, price depending on storage/number of user/services accessed
• Neat and modern UIs
• Packaged and well defined services

This is this last point that led some of those providers to open their infrastructures, putting in place the Next Big Thing :

Hardware as a Service, HaaS

Those SaaS providers have grown their infrastructure  to support scaling and reliability for their services…the next step is to open it and monetize it.

So here is HaaS where the business model is simply to sell some RAM/CPU/Storage/Bandwidth/some services according to the needs of the customer.

• The real first One: Amazon EC2, part of Amazon Web Service (AWS) platform. A way to deploy and scale a web application, paying only for the resources it actually uses (prices are around 0.10$ to 0.80$ of cpu/hour, 0.10$ per GB transferred, 0.15$ per GB stored per month, 0.01$ per 1000/10000 PUT/GET requests).(side note: Adobe proposes LiveCycle ES on Amazon Cloud).  Amazon describes its solution as:
  • Elastic: user can increase or decrease their hardware requirements within minutes
  • Flexible: user can choose specification of each individual instance of computer power purchased
  • Inexpensive: no dedicated capital investment required
  • Reliable: make use of Amazon proven datacenter and network infrastructure.
• Google of course is there (do your self a favor and read this about the AMAZING Google infrastructure) with Google App Engine , free for now but fairly limited
• Little actors like Mosso,  GoGrid or 3tera are popping out on the same kind of technology
• IBM is jumping also with Blue Cloud
• HP, Intel, Yahoo join forces on cloud computing research
• For me Facebook is part of the game: easy way to deploy and monetize (?) social applications. Ning is another example (for social networks)
• And of course Microsoft with Azure:

Azure seems to be really complete with a new OS, great marketing materials etc…but as always with MS not really available yet. Business model is again identical: you pay what you use as resources.

See above a schema about those technologies. What is emerging is a new kind of OS capable to handle

• faulty hardware,
• load balancing,
• heavy multiprocessing and parallelization,
• virtualization technologies are key here (at least I understand the market cap of VMWare now!) ,
• advanced storage technologies and databases.

Google has built its own stuff (the three core elements of Google’s software: GFS, the Google File System, BigTable, and the MapReduce algorithm), Microsoft too (and present Azure as it is : a new OS), Amazon, Yahoo and others are using some Open-Source initiatives like http://hadoop.apache.org/ .

A nice summary of what we can do with cloud computing, from the Yahoo white paper:

What does it take to get the Next Great Thing off the
ground?

Now:

• Set up multiple replicas of a clustered data store
• Set up a system for indexing
• Set up a system for caching
• Set up auxiliary DBMS instances for reporting, etc.
• Set up the feeds and messaging between them
• Write the application logic
• Fairly complex system at first line of new code

Our vision:

• Write the application logic
• Use a hosted infrastructure to store and query your data

=> Or, as Joshua Shachter puts it: “The next cool thing shouldn’t take a team
of 30, it should be three guys, PHP and a long weekend”

Yahoo white paper

This is all well and good but where is the catch?

Many aspects are slowing this IT revolution

• Concerns around privacy and collusion: giving all my (as a company) data AND processing of my critical business to Amazon and Google may lead to collusion, Google is no more the “don’t be evil” it may have been, nor Microsoft or Amazon…Or even worse if I am a service provider new entrant (hum say like Nokia with Ovi for example), I just can’t use Google Infrastructure for that! How can I trust Google about my competing usage of its own resources to deliver a service …that competes with Google own ones?
• Concerns about stability. Most cloud vendors today do not provide availability assurances. This is particularly an issue with Mashups that need a set of web services hosted in various cloud computing environments, and many may stop working at any time. Seeing the MobileMe launch fiasco, Apple learnt how difficult it is!
•  Concerns around security. The old dilemma: “should I put my money in a Bank or in my own building” …we all know the right answer now.
• Regulation issues:  For Example in Europe, some countries require services and/or customer data be retained within a country’s borders.
• This is new technology: even if simple, there is a learning
• IT service may feel threatened: after all the tedious tasks of updating, backup, hardware handling are now externalized…

One key point seems to be that to be trusted cloud computing providers have to stop offering their own services and focus ONLY on providing a compelling and efficient cloud platform.

Where is the Mobile industry: client side?

As said by Tim O’Reilly in the first quote, ALL the devices are morphing to cloud access points, phones are on their way, MID and Netbooks are just showing it more clearly.

The iPhone is the first real device to access the cloud effectively, and what is really interesting about it is that the browser is not the preferred choice to access the cloud: the vast majority of non-game iPhone applications are simply optimized front-end to a dedicated  SaaS! I predict the same for Android Marketplace…and many software actors will pop out  around this cloud interaction.

Nokia is morphing into a cloud computing provider …but doing the whole stuff alone: Ovi being the infrastructure AND the service, and Nokia devices nice cloud front-end.

Time will tell if an actor alone can handle those three aspects, Google, Microsoft and Apple are also trying…

Where is the Mobile industry: server side?

Doing this overview I was really surprised to not see the “natural” actors of this new paradigm:

• Who has a BIG infrastructure?
• Who can link this infrastructure to the final devices/customer?
• Who is deploying complex services to million of customers for decades?
• Who handles directly the customer billing?

….hum you guessed it : our beloved CARRIERS!

Cloud computing would be a fantastic way for them to not fall in the dumb pipe category. Let’s face it, developing services has to be done by service providers, not operators (who wants to use its operator IM or mail? social network? photo sharing?) .

If carriers were able to leverage their fantastic cloud computing capabilities, they may stop developing sure-to-fail-services and monetize their pipe not only to the final customer but also smartly from the service provider ( NaaS seems to be a first attempt but I still don’t understand the business model). Perhaps a bold statement, I would be more than happy to have some carrier comments on this one!

Looking forward to your comments.

-Thomas

As I’ve advocated not so long ago in those 2 posts about capuchin and what it means to fragmentation and the Adobe packager and the trend it shows toward runtimes (cross posted to VisionMobile here for capuchin and here for Adobe packager).

But Sender 11 really have for me the best argument about it:

But the strange thing is I don’t hear developers complaining much about fragmentation any more. They may be too busy creating apps for the iPhone and Android. A straightforward, low barrier way to monetize your app apparently trumps standardization any day. A way to make money is more important than a way to save money.

Morten Hjerde, What’s your developer story?

Well what else to add? Adapting a software to platform is only a 2nd order issue if you can monetize it. Thanks to all the AppStores.

Anyway really take the time to read the whole article, very good analysis about fragmentation, maximized with those “open-but-proprietary-platform-with-my-very-own-apis-and-my-very-own-store”  where there is 0 compatibility between an Android application and an iPhone one…but who cares?

Anyway I think the fragmentation issue will pop back with the explosion of different AppStores and new platforms (perhaps an actor has something to do here ), and I’m not convinced the browser will be the right way to do it.

Thanks Morten for this insightful article, hope to meet you in Barcelona!

[Adobe just released and new way to package Flash Lite Applications for S60 and WindowsMobile: this, if linked to the announced Google native client, the Adobe Alchemy product and other industry initiatives is an indication of where the desktop and mobile development are going. Blogger Thomas Menguy tries to bring some coherence to those seemingly uncorrelated initiatives].

  At one time application developer were targeting an OS: Windows, MacOS, Unix.

  At one point the target began to be runtimes (or Application Environments as defined by Andreas): the web browser, the flash player (inside the web browser), javaVMs, .NET more recently javaFX, silverlight, AIR…

  In all case each runtime is imposing its development environment, tools, SDK and above all a development language (Java for the javaVMs, Action script for Flash/Air, Javascript for the web browser, C# for .net).

And of course your runtime has to be installed on your final target, BEFORE deploying your application or content.

But everything is blurring now, here are some evidences:

• Mobile Open OS are all offering solid and robust application and content management (AppStore syndrome): a runtime sandboxing its dedicating content from the rest of the system is seen like an unnatural way and bad user experience to handle content
• Google has a framework (GWT: Google Web Toolkit) to develop for the web browser runtime … except that the development language is NOT javascript
  • You develop in Java
  • In Eclipse or NetBean
  • You can use a RAD
  • The Java code is compiled in Javascript and will run in a browser not a javaVM (except for development)
  • This brings a kind of unified approach for the client and the server
• OpenLaszlo is a great RIA development platform …without a specific runtime :
  • You develop in the OpenLazlo language : LZX, a specific XML + Javascript
  • You compile your code for flash or DHTML (a Java version exists but doesn’t seem to be supported anymore) so you can select your runtime! 
• .Net /Silverlight
  • You can choose you development language VB#, C# or action script
  • All are compiled to the .NET bytecode runtime
  • Microsoft is releasing its “Expression” line of tools to bring ease of development to the designer/developer
• Adobe AIR
  • You can develop in Flash/Flex/Action Script or … in AJAX (javascript)+HTML
  • The Air runtime is in fact an aggregation of a Web Runtime (Webkit) and a standalone FlashPlayer
  • Your applications are deployed …nearly like any other application of the underlying platform, the nearly is important because the AIR runtime installation is still visible, as is the application air packaging
  • Adobe is releasing Catalyst, a very nice WYSIWYG application prototype IDE targeted to designers with strong links to CS4
• Google Native Plugin
  • Allows to develop and reuse C/C++ code … in the browser
  • use a raw GCC toolchain (and so the browser plugin has certainly to embed an OS independent dynamic loader…reminds me something we are doing for years at Open-Plug )
• Haxe:
  • An Action script like language you can compile to … php, C++, java and of course ActionScript
  • Unification of the client and server development
• The adobe alchemy project (for the techies, explained here):
  • Compile any C/C++ code to ActionScript byte code to be run in a flash player (example of Doom, here,  and Quake running in flash are now famous)
• And this post ignition triggering news: Adobe Mobile Packager
  • Development in CS4, with CS3 device central
  • Flash Lite Application is packaged in a “standard” .CAB file for windows and .SIS file for S60, with everything needed to make your application run
  • Flash Lite applications are no more second class citizens, you don’t have to open the flash runtime anymore to launch such applications
• SonyEricsson Capuchin
  • … is at the end the way to package flash lite application in a java jar file.

All those examples are depicting underlying trends:

• We see, more and more an uncorrelation between the development environment and the targeted runtimes
• Many development languages are popping out, and we won’t have a “one language fits all” : developer will tends to use
  • What they know , and it’s even easier now with all those tools
  • Reuse some legacy as much as possible
  • What fits best for a particular task
  • What can help client/server development
• Ease of development and tooling seems to be key, especially looking at Microsoft and Adobe strategies
• The on device final Application Management is left to the underlying platform/OS and will be more and more abstracted for the developer that is targeting multiple platforms with a single application development environment.

From what I see today, I tend to think that Adobe is getting it right, little by little, especially thanks to their very strong tooling offer (CS4/FlexBuilder/Catalyst)…and we may see other initiatives from other players like Nokia or even Google to accelerate the development and deployment of services (web or not).

Interesting times for a developer! 

Let’s share your thoughts in the comments.

Thomas

Let’s find out why this shift means a lot for Rich desktop and Mobile Applications

Google web APIs are simply the most used and prevalent today, allowing a full range of mash-ups and new web services…but what not a lot of people know is that it was simply not legal to use Google maps APIs outside of a web site, so namely in an application!

This is why only Google were providing native applications around their maps services for mobile phone (iPhone apps, WinMob, J2me), and PC (Google Earth)

And now they changed their mind:

There were both technical and legal challenges blocking AIR support in our API. AIR has a different security model, which required a number of changes to the “internal plumbing” of the API in order to implement our delayed-loading model, where the actual implementation of the map’s functionality loads dynamically from Google’s servers once the application launches. Also, our Terms of Service used to specify that the Maps API could only be used for online web applications.

Now that both the API and Terms of Service have undergone a facelift, we are releasing the first version of the API that will allow Flash/Flex developers to bring Google Maps to the AIR runtime.

Google developer blog

This is is a big acknowledgment from Google of the relevance of desktop and mobile rich applications to access “in the cloud” data, the browser is no more the only deployment method for web services, and the nice work done by Adobe around AIR/OpenScreen is pushing this idea making it more and more mainstream…iPhone apps for the most part are specialized access to web resources, and what to say about Android? This trend is also followed by Nokia through its Trolltech acquisition for the QT technology, check my little post about this one here.

So thanks Google! let now see what’s coming from the web…and this old boy called desktop and its mobile children!

For those that are following this blog…you’ve seen that I’m talking frequently (hum not as my posting recently ) about low cost phones. It’s just because I mean it, we know how hard it is to complete a phone software on very cheap platforms. But here we are! A phone is out, and it’s a Sony-Ericsson one, well yes we are proud checkout the press release (it is just all over the web today):

Open-Plug Powers the New J132 Mobile Phone From Sony Ericsson
Monday November 24, 3:00 am ET

- The Open-Plug Software Suite for Mobile Phones Will be Rolled out in Large Numbers Across Europe and Asia

SOPHIA ANTIPOLIS, France and LUND, Sweden, November 24 /PRNewswire/ — Open-Plug, the specialist in software development environments for mass-market mobile phones, announces today that its ELIPS application suite is embedded in Sony Ericsson’s J132 mobile phone. The J132 is a talk and text phone with FM radio and stereo hands free kit.

"We are very proud to be cooperating with Sony Ericsson, one of the top leaders in the mobile phone industry", said Eric Baissus, CEO of Open-Plug. "This is an additional demonstration of the maturity and performance of our ELIPS solution."

Open-Plug has developed the ELIPS software suite to address the strategic market of low cost and mass-market phones. The demand is exploding and drives very significant volume worldwide. Thanks to the performance and flexibility of its underlying award-winning component technology, ELIPS enables fast development of new mobile phone models and simplifies implementation of new software features and user interfaces.

Open-Plug’s solution is a major step forward towards the reduction of development time and costs for handsets and mobile applications. ELIPS is attracting more and more software developers and handset makers who want to re-use their investment from one platform to another and develop variants in record time. It is the result of 5 years of R&D and includes several patented technologies.

About Open-Plug

Open-Plug creates and commercializes ELIPS, the first open application development environment designed for mass-market mobile phones. Already shipped in millions of devices, ELIPS enables software companies, handset makers and operators to create and deploy mobile applications, rich user interfaces as well as complete software solution, in record time.

Founded in 2002, Open-Plug is a private company financed by leading international venture capital investors. Headquartered in France, the company also operates in Taipei, Taiwan R.O.C. Open-Plug is a member of the LiMo Foundation (Linux Mobile Foundation).

For more information, visit http://www.open-plug.com

…well technically this is the contrary , check it out at Linux Devices

In kicking off the conference, Nyström emphasized Nokia’s interest in horizontally broadening Qt support across as many platforms as possible. Asked whether the company would also target new verticals, such as automotive infotainment, Nyström did not rule out the possibility. However, in a private interview with LinuxDevices, he admitted, “For Nokia, the real value of Trolltech is in Qt.”

Qt Software Chief Sebastian Nyström

Ok, everything is said: Nokia acknowledges that they have bought Trolltech for Qt as a multi-platform runtime to deploy services, on desktop and devices…I’m really curious to see in  what Nokia morphs…again.

Ok, I’m a browser freak, check my Start menu:

Only Opera missing .

For the last few months Safari has been my default browser, for two main reasons:

• Speed! (blow even Chrome in the water for me)
• Font rendering: much more smoother than all the others, easier for the eyes
• Did I mention Speed?

But one thing was really annoying: when clicking on an URL in outlook or any other application: IE or Firefox were launched (in fact the last “default browser” I’ve set before Safari) instead of Safari!

Here is a tip to fix it:

• Be sure that safari has been set as your default browser
• In any explorer window, got to tools/folder options

• Then File Types, select “URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol”

• Click on Advanced, select Open

• Click Edit and fill the form has in the next screenshot

• Click OK,OK and do the same for “URL:HyperText Transfer Protocol with Privacy”

And now your links are properly opened in Safari!

Hope this helps!

Thomas

Thanks David for finding this nice one:

found here.

…looking at the prices, and compared to the BOM of an Ultra low cost phone (now around 15$ for the best OEMs)…well you understand why smartphones are not cheap…and how difficult it is to do an Ultra Low Cost phone!

…I just can"’t imagine the margins chip manufacturer are doing on those application processors.

This really back-up what I’ve exposed here about application processors.

Any comments?

Thomas.