NedNotes

Recent Ned News

Tue, 29 May 2012 12:45:29 -0700

I live a busy life, splitting my efforts between collaboration with my amazing technology team at Intel under Peter Biddle and my writing efforts in novel-length fiction.

Both of my lives are covered in several recent articles:

The Seattle Times covered my ‘super-commute’ to Palo Alto and Seattle over the last few years when I worked for Paul Allen’s Kiha and PARC’s Meshin project. Here’s the Seattle Times article on Trains, planes and supercommuters, which discusses my work and my writing on my commute.

ThurstonTalk in Olympia covered my work as a writer in their recent article Olympia Area Writers, which includes coverage of Jim Lynch, Thom Jones… and Ned Hayes.

How Facebook is able to take your Likes and turn it into contextual data

Tue, 29 May 2012 12:27:49 -0700

bitshare:

Facebook is now up to 900 million users, which was uncovered in their recent Initial Public Offering. Having that many users, close to a billion, is astronomic for any one entity which then has to take that user data and turn it into something - that something being useful data which is forming the social web which many want to be a part of and which Facebook can benefit financially from. So, how does Facebook do it all?

Read More

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers...

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 10:00:06 -0700

The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom. - Isaac Asimov

"We're no longer a PC company, we're an IT company."

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 08:00:05 -0800

"We're no longer a PC company, we're an IT company.":

parislemon:

That’s not IBM. That’s not HP. That’s Dell.

But you’ll notice the trend. Everyone is getting out of the PC business because it’s a shitty business to be in.

IBM was way ahead of the curve (and is reaping the rewards as a result). While seemingly insane at the time, HP had the right idea last year (then backtracked and got burned last quarter). Now Dell.

You often hear the argument that Apple will eventually be squeezed in their high-margin hardware businesses. That cheaper components will drive costs down and cheap products will win. But that “win” comes with an asterisk. It’s a short-lived win. Eventually, it will turn to a loss both figuratively and literally.

One of Apple’s strengths is the quality of their products, which allows for better margins. But their real strength is staying ahead of trends. Apple dropped “computer” from their name in 2007. They saw the writing on the wall. They still make computers, but they have long since become a secondary business massively trumped by other businesses (first the iPod, then the iPhone, now the iPad).

Dell lacked such foresight. Maybe it’s too late now, or maybe not. But I like John Gruber’s suggestion.

smarterplanet: Your Life as Data: The Rise of Personal Annual...

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 10:00:05 -0800

smarterplanet:

Your Life as Data: The Rise of Personal Annual Reports | Mashable

Every time he drinks a cup of coffee, Dan Meyer makes a note on his phone. He does the same every time he opens a beer, turns on his TV or travels away from home. At the end of each month, he spends about three hours transferring these meticulously gathered notes into an excel spreadsheet. Meyer isn’t obsessive compulsive, he just likes data. Like an increasing number of data geeks, he uses his personal life as a project — compiling small events into a sometimes elaborate, graphic annual report each January.

thenextweb: Kaplan’s latest app, Bellbot, might not get...

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0800

thenextweb:

Kaplan’s latest app, Bellbot, might not get acquired, but it’s yet another interesting creation from a guy who has seen it all in Silicon Valley. The service allows you to drop a single line of code on any page of your site, and a bell will ring when someone hits it. In a TinyLetter email today, Kaplan explains the service: I came up with the idea a long time ago when I read a story about how Jeff Bezos (Amazon founder) in the early days rigged a bell to play every time Amazon had a new customer. Also I think it’s fairly common for sales people to ring a bell (or smash a gong) every time they have a sale. So this is a virtual version of that. (via Bellbot is a Fun Way to Celebrate New Users)

Writing Blog: What Really Matters - One Mother's Story

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 12:24:51 -0800

Writing Blog: What Really Matters - One Mother's Story:

sinfulfolk:

Yesterday, I was at my daughter’s school. One of her teachers nicely asked about my forthcoming book. Here’s what I said: “The book is set in the 14th century - the Middle Ages - it’s about a former nun who has lived in secret for 10 years. Then her son is killed, and she goes on a terrible…

thenextweb: Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, (16 December 1917 – 19...

Wed, 15 Feb 2012 10:00:05 -0800

thenextweb:

Sir Arthur Charles Clarke, (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) was a British science fiction author, inventor, and futurist, famous for his short stories and novels, among them 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), and as a host and commentator in the British television series Mysterious World.

I find this fascinating. The history of robots and artificial...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 10:00:06 -0800

I find this fascinating.

The history of robots and artificial life, courtesy of LQ’s Robot matrix.

Golden Gate Bridge from the Air on Flickr.

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 10:00:06 -0800

Golden Gate Bridge from the Air on Flickr.

reuters: Graphic: Breaking down Facebook’s initial public...

Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:00:06 -0800

reuters:

Graphic: Breaking down Facebook’s initial public offering.

Read more: In Facebook IPO, bankers seek prestige over fees

At GigaOM Mobilize 2011 in San Francisco Ned Hayes presents...

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 08:00:05 -0800

At GigaOM Mobilize 2011 in San Francisco
Ned Hayes presents Meshin from PARC (Palo Alto Research Center)

The Future of Mobile Productivity?

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 21:02:00 -0800

Spec is Dead - Bring on the Apps

CES 2012 was notable for the heavy emphasis on Android ideas of all sizes, shapes and attitudes. Top of the list was the Amazon Kindle Fire. Last year, I was at CES as well. That year, there were the hip young MotoBlur-wannabes, like the HTC Sense interface and the Galaxy Tab. Hardware, hardware, hardware.

But as MG Siegler pointed out earlier this year, the hardware spec is dead. Great kit doesn’t matter without great applications. And that’s where I come in.

On Point with Aro Mobile App

Over the last five years, I’ve worked on some pretty amazing mobile applications, with some incredibly bright engineering and design teams. Last year at CES, I was lucky enough to be the man-on-point to showcase Aro Mobile, a new Android communications management system of AI-empowered apps (whatever “AI-empowered” means to you). Master of hyperbole Robert Scoble called Aro Mobile “the most innovative thing I’ve seen done for mobile phones lately” and “quite remarkable.” Scoble noted that Aro Mobile was “like Rapportive or Xobni, but done much better.”

With this first review, Scoble put his finger on the value proposition of Aro Mobile. The product was designed to solve the overarching mobile productivity problem. It aimed at being the app that would make great hardware worth buying.

Problem Still Unsolved

Yet one year later, the problem of many apps and too much data still hasn’t been solved. The whole smartphone communications experience is still really siloed and chaotic - even in 2012. It’s still hard to get things done when you’re on the go. The problem is compounded by the size and performance issues of small mobile phones and the ever-increasing flood of information. Today, I live in mobile communications madness.

There’s too much information incoming to my inbox, my email, my Twitter stream. This is MY information - it’s my communications - but it’s just too unwieldy and too disorganized for me to grapple with effectively.

There’s a reason very busy people declare email bankruptcy (like Dave McClure and Michael Arrington and Robert Scoble). The NY Times Bits Blog noted that “efficiently searching through [your phone] to quickly locate contacts, coming events and addresses is still time-intensive, confusing and often frustrating.”

The Aro Mobile Solution

To solve this communication chaos problem, the Kiha team developed Aro Mobile to act “as a kind of personal virtual assistant for a phone” (NY Times). The way Aro Mobile worked was by use of semantic technology that mined through your information and created a “social network from all your services on the phone.” Then the complete set of information was uploaded to a “cloud computing platform” (MIT Technology Review).

I probably can’t tell you precisely what the go-to-market plan was. But knowledgeable sources like Jon Lazarus (CEO) said that Aro Mobile could be “tightly built into a phone” (MIT Review) and that he was working to “strike deals with carriers and handset partners” (All Things D, WSJ).

Pretty clearly, Aro Mobile was destined to be “acquired and baked in,” perhaps by “a manufacturer of Android devices” (Nova Spivack, MIT Review). Other options included the possibility of providing a downloadable app that could generate revenue from advertising or from referring users (Lazarus, MIT Technology Review).

Since Aro Mobile was more than just a client application though, the whole system would constitute a service delivery platform for a mobile content provider or a major telecommunications carrier. The client might first be available on Android, and then later on the iPhone (we had both — as can be seen in the Aro Web 2.0 demo).

Where Could Aro Mobile Have Gone?

Aro Mobile was built on some significant intellectual property - employees and past employees list patents on their LinkedIn profiles related to semantic analysis of data sets, machine intelligence (whatever that is!), and mobile User Interface improvements - like the unique MindJet-like “action menus” that popped out from recognized terms. Ultimately, the relevancy engine(s) and semantic analysis tools are probably the most interesting from an acquisition perspective, as the UI elements have existed in one form or another for quite a few years. You can see similar and more subtle “smart menus” in Apple OS X Lion — these are based on pattern recognition though, not semantic analysis of related terms. The effect for users is much the same.

The leading technology companies are going to this place very quickly. And if the price point was right, I could definitely see Apple or Google snapping up Paul Allen’s little venture. As the NY Times Bits Blog noted “Playing around with Aro makes me think about the potential for a smarter mobile phone that combines Aro-integrated apps with something like Siri’s voice-activated commands… You can start to imagine how a phone would understand a lot more about its owner, and actually get things done.”

Next Steps

One year ago, after the stellar coverage from Robert Scoble and the NY Times, TechCrunch got on board by releasing private invites to the closed Aro Beta. What was more, MG Siegler described how Aro Mobile ”weaves itself into the OS and uses AI and machine intelligence to make sense of what you’re doing with your phone” ( TechCrunch). The Aro Mobile marketing team created a series of videos to explain the product in even more detail. First my colleague Matt Haugh and I created a basic - and clear - product demo.

Then Aro Mobile released an incredibly cheesy fake-people-on-the-street video (Thankfully, I can’t claim much credit for this one!)

What was interesting about this video though was that journalists finally seemed to get the complete vision of the product once they watched this video. I’m not sure what this says about the intelligence of your average journalist…

Casey of Digital Fewsure was probably the best of the earlier reviewers. He wrote: “Picture it as a computer that reads all your activity, is aware of the tools that can help phone users, then organizes and provides sensible solutions to make your phone experience easier and more seamless.” This nicely summed up the Aro Mobile value proposition.

All this blogging activity drove more coverage. GigaOm covered Aro, saying that “Aro’s platform helps make smartphones more intelligent and useful by tying the basic applications [on a phone] dynamically to the cloud.” (GigaOm) ReadWriteWeb described our system as providing “the ability to understand” your communications, and said that our “machine intelligence” added a “smart layer of data and understanding to your communications” ( ReadWriteWeb).

The Axe Falls

Unfortunately, around that time, TechFlash announced the departure of founding CEO Jon Lazarus.

Clouds of doom were on the horizon for Aro Mobile, but still the team moved forward.

Finally, the last article of news coverage arrived just as the team ramped up for CES. Mashable wrote that Aro Mobile “seeks to become the central nervous system of your phone, processing… information to help improve overall function” because the system can “understand context and then make intelligent recommendations” (Mashable). Thank you, Mashable!

But less than a month after CES last year, with a lot of momentum, Aro Mobile was killed by Kiha Software.

The promise of Aro Mobile was still there, but without a product.

What’s Next?

I left and joined PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) to work on similar problems as part of the Meshin team. One of the first things I did was attend the InBoxLove conference about email and how to manage communications better. While I was at the conference, I heard quite a number of questions about Aro Mobile. People wondered what happened to an amazing product with great coverage.

I can’t share all the details (bound as I am by onerous NDAs), but I can tell you that Aro Mobile is no longer available on any phone, and that many of the original team members departed.

However, it’s interesting to notethat some of the smartest minds in terms of datamining and data analytics are still at Vulcan — so perhaps that smart team are still coming up with the next big thing!

During this past year, I’ve done nearly 200 user interviews, discerning use cases and understanding pain points around communication and email overload. Given my knowledge of what might have been, I desperately miss the Aro Mobile - the problems with mobile communications are still there today.

Today, the field of realtime data analytics for your inbox is hot, and growing. Google Priority Inbox has taken off — Apple keeps adding functions and features. And Microsoft wants to play here too.

Let me set some context by pointing out that there are two small bright teams with significant head-starts.

Kiha created and killed Aro Mobile in a pell-mell 3 year sprint - and I wouldn’t discount that team yet (they’ve taken the name Aro for the company now).

The other solid tool is Meshin, and was started by PARC nearly 6 years ago. This year, I took Meshin from the desktop to mobile — first on Android, and soon to be on iPhone too.

Aro Mobile didn’t succeed. But Meshin is available today, who knows where it will grow?

Communication chaos is a real problem, and we need a real solution. Who will get there first?

————————————-

(NOTE that in regards to Aro Mobile and Kiha Software, I’ve only referenced publicly available information - no proprietary or confidential information is revealed in this blog post. See the list of my sources below.)

SOURCES:
(listed first at Exit Strategy News)

11/29/2010 - First Look at Aro for iPhone: Can This Semantic Software Replace Your Core Mobile Apps? Sarah Perez, Read Write Web.

11/15/2010 - Aro Mobile Uses the Cloud to Build Smarter Smartphone Ryan Kim, GigaOM.

11/15/2010 - Aro Offers a Parallel Universe Where Mobile Apps Work Together Liz Gannes, All Things D - Wall Street Journal.

11/9/2010 - Aro Organizes the World Inside Your Smart Phone Tom Simonite, MIT Technology Review.

11/9/2010 - Aro Smartphone Application: A Personal Assistant in Your Back Pocket Tammy Wolf, TMCnet.

10/28/2010 - Aro Mobile and the Next Generation of Business Phones Casey Fictum, Digitalfewsure.

10/27/2010 - Aro Mobile Shows Some Skin - Some Android Skin. And We Have Invites. MG Siegler, TechCrunch.

10/26/2010 - Aro Mobile Wants To Simplify Your Mobile Phone Bits Blog, Jenna Wortham, New York Times.

10/25/2010 - First look at Aro: another example of why chaos on Android is good Robert Scoble, Scobleizer.

Who are these people?

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 14:54:00 -0700

Who are these people, really?

Early this morning, I saw a tweet from @kendall, who apparently runs a “semantic web startup” in D.C. — I’ve never met the guy, but I wrote a quick reply and we had a lively discussion re. philosophy and software.

The same rapid-fire riposte happens for me several times a day — recent exchanges with @davepeck and @JessicaNorthey come to mind. Most are funny (jokes and humor are short and sweet), some are grave (#YesGayYA and #Jan25 come to mind) — but it’s difficult NOT to trivialize even weighty topics in 140 characters.

But it IS possible to genuinely connect with another human being (unless you believe that Turing’s famous test has already been passed). A tweet from @davepeck led to my current gig at @PARCinc, working with the great @Meshin team.

Today, I learned from @kendall that we share a passion for philosophy and software (attributes too rarely combined, imho). But is @kendall my friend? I’ve got over 200 people who “like” my writing on Facebook — but are they really my friends?

Some of them are — @KurtRader and I meet face to face about 2 hours a week over coffee and catch up on our lives — he’s a deep friend. I hardly know @kendall, but we’re linked a little now.

So who are these people, if they are not my friends?

Here’s a second point to consider:

I was running late for a plane at SFO today (for my friends, this is not a surprise) — and I was in a LONG line.

I very nicely asked 25 people (1 by 1) to step aside and let me go to the front of the line. Each of them graciously did so.

Interestingly enough, years ago, when my wife was in labor with my daughter, and I hopped on a plane to get back home to Seattle — the same wonderful thing happened! (this time, no baby was being born)

I owe these people all a debt of gratitude. But I don’t even know their names. Who are these people?

Whoever you are, thank you.

Thank you, @Kendall. Thank you, @DavePeck. Thank you to my facebook followers. And thank you to all those semi-anonymous “friends” who helped me make my plane and get off the ground. Thank you!

Who are these wonderful people?

Smartphone Futures: Nokia & Microsoft

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 08:14:00 -0800

How mighty Nokia has fallen. Today, Nokia announced a “strategic alliance” with once arch-enemy Microsoft. In so many ways, this looks like a stealth takeover. After all, former Microsoft leading light Stephen Elop became CEO of Nokia in September. A mere five months later, he announces that Windows Phone 7 will become Nokia’s “primary platform” for smartphones.

To Elop’s credit, it is quite true that Nokia was standing on a burning platform, and there were few good options for the storied mobile leader. Once, Nokia was Europe’s strongest technology company: in the 1990s Europe had standardized on Nokia’s as the platform of choice — Symbian was on 330 million phones! When I was studying mobile trends at Adobe’s Advanced Tech Lab in the 90s and early 2000s, Europe was the place to be for mobile innovation. Silicon Valley was far behind.

The iPhone changed all this in 2007. Gradually, Apple cornered half the profits in mobility — even though Nokia still had the lion’s share of the market. (See this chart from the Economist for details.) American install base rapidly surpassed Europe, and the iPhone became the dominant mobile paradigm — at least on the high end. On the low end, Chinese cheap phones crept into the developing world, and took over 1/3 of the market. In 2010, Huawei brought in $28 billion in revenues (and nearly $3 billion in profits!), matching Sony Ericsson point for point. The game was almost over for Europe — and for Nokia.

The real story behind the Nokia+Microsoft deal isn’t the particular platform that Nokia chose, but rather the fact that Nokia fully realizes that the game in moible isn’t hardware anymore, but software and services.

Nokia was trapped in a commodity hardware world, where kit mattered more than content. But mobile has rapidly moved from hardware to software and content services like search, mobile apps and data on device. For this market, Google and Apple could bring heavy weaponry — both companies understood how to capitalize on content and software platforms. iOS and Android were perfectly positioned for this sea-change in mobility. The jury is still out on Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 platform, but Steve Ballmer is investing heavily in becoming a player (again!) in mobile.

Personally, I don’t really care which platform Nokia chooses — but competition is good for everyone. Here’s hoping Nokia succeeds in a desperate gamble to become relevant again in smartphones.

Amazon, Grow Up

Fri, 11 Feb 2011 08:18:00 -0800

Today, Amazon announced they’d be shutting down a distribution center in Dallas, Texas. This is a result of Amazon’s ongoing battle with Texas over collecting sales tax, and is just one more salvo in the war Amazon is fighting with a number of states, ranging from California to New York to Colorado to North Carolina to Tennessee.

A lot of people are up in arms, opposing any attempt to collect sales tax — on that side of the equation are many of my fellow technorati.

The rally cry goes “Information wants to be free!” and apparently, “Business wants to be free!“

I’m in the opposite camp. Here’s why.

Believe it or not, taxes exist for the common good. Especially state taxes. I live in a state capitol (the lovely Olympia, WA), and I gotta tell you, state workers are hardly over-compensated. Every dime is micro-managed down to the bone, and the vast majority of funds are used for important items like nursing homes, rehabilitation services, child welfare services, police pay, highway repair, and — believe it or not — ensuring that we have a solid infrastructure for corporations.

Amazon is the beneficiary of an improving public transportation system (which will be improving further) in Washington State, and a dynamic building boom in the Seattle area — much of which was funded by public dollars. Taxes. Corporate taxes.

Finally, they sure as hell couldn’t attract their employees to Seattle if it had the tax base of a Detroit. High-tech employees wouldn’t re-locate to an area with terrible schools, defunct public utilities and urban blight. The taxes paid by every other company in Washington State sure as hell made it possible for Amazon to exist, and thrive in this state. Hell, they couldn’t have a distribution center in Texas — or Colorado — if some corporation hadn’t paid taxes for the airport and the roads.

Pony up, Amazon, make it right. (By the way, if you work for any brick-and-mortar retailer, Amazon’s approach to this fight has a corollary in the way China’s policies have crippled our economy in real competition. Amazon is also fighting an unfair fight. If you’re a techno-libertarian — or a conservative economist — don’t you want a fair field for a fight? Should government largesse privilege one player over another?)

Here’s a quote that sums up the moral contract a business should uphold as a “corporate citizen” in our society: “A company the size of Amazon with $14 billion in sales should not be given a government-sponsored advantage over brick-and-mortar retailers,” said Jason Brewer, a spokesman for Retailer Industry Leaders Association.

The libertarian rallying cry taken up by many is really a childish approach to the tax fight. Amazon is simply trying to avoid the basic responsibilities of a grown-up business, to contribute to the economy in areas in which it has customers. Sure, it won’t be good for the bottom line.

That’s kind of the point. It’s for the larger good. Not your bottom line.

Be a grown-up business, and stop fighting the hand that actually feeds you.

Grow up, Amazon.

Are smartphones broken? You tell me. (This is the problem...

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 20:01:38 -0800

Are smartphones broken? You tell me.

(This is the problem statement for Aro Mobile, which I worked on most recently at Kiha Software)

creating a better body

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 09:21:54 -0800

I’ve had some fun recently watching and reading about the Terminator series. It’s not a bad attempt to bring a large SF franchise into the more constrained world of TV, and there’s considerable fan momentum. As I watch and read, I’ve been thinking about the distinctions drawn on the show between human beings and the machine beings they confront / work with / fear. Although it’s just entertainment, the questions raised by drama like this will begin to be increasingly important to us in the coming decades. For example, let’s think a bit about constructing a human-like machine.

If you were creating an artificial lifeform from the ground-up, what kinds of elements would you use?

First, in any kind of hostile environment, it would be wise to create an internal skeleton made of a matrix of some sort of highly flexible yet very strong metal. A network that would carry materials to re-build and upgrade internal systems — the best way of communicating would be through a chemical/electrical metallic soup of individually independent systems — little nano-like magnetized iron particles, each of which would contain the whole blueprint for the system, so you wouldn’t have to send signals back to some sort of central system in order to effect remote repairs on independent portions of the system.

Oh, and best of all, if you could have a self re-generating type of exoskeleton that would render the internal system and iron-based fluid network impervious to water contamination or external forces, that would be great. So, it really suits the Terminator-like model: metal interior skeleton, electrically-conducting interior network, metallic, iron-based magnetized nano-particles that each have a miniature copy of the entire system. Self-re-generating properties. Couple that with a strong brain based on electrical and chemical reactions, and we actually have… a human being.

Calcium — the basic building block of our internal skeleton — is, in fact, a metal. Here’s some more information about the metal calcium, the fifth most abundant element in the Earth’s surface. When used in a lattice-like framework, calcium is incredibly strong. Stronger than steel of similar weight and construction (which is the reason that in the Terminator movie and show they use a hitherto-undiscovered metal). And each of our blood cells in our veins contain our DNA as a blueprint of our whole system, and blood itself is iron-based — and arguably magnetizable (the considerable degree of iron in our blood turns it red on exposure to oxygen, and turns it brown like rust after long exposure). The brain, and our nervous system run off a combination of electrical and chemical impulses.

When we think of trying to construct a metal robot that is bipedal and self-sufficient (not to mention self re-generating), we really have in front of us an amazing model of how metal and electrical systems can evolve.

While we’re on the topic, I came across an interesting bit of Terminator trivia this weekend.

Remember the original Terminator movie? Whenever you see through the eyes of The Terminator himself, a bunch of computery text is scrolling by. It turns out this text is the source code for an Apple II checksum program, among other programs. The code was first published in Nibble magazine in the early 80’s, so was close at hand when the movie’s producers needed something high-tech for their futuristic robot/killing machine/bodybuilder.

The code featured in the movie runs on a 70’s-era MOS 6502 microprocessor.

This is a Tumblr Cloud I generated from my blog posts between...

Sun, 06 Feb 2011 08:16:00 -0800

This is a Tumblr Cloud I generated from my blog posts between Dec 2009 and Feb 2011 containing my top 20 used words.

Android Rising, and Rising

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 12:39:00 -0800

Five years ago, Android was just a gleam in Andy Rubin’s eye… there wasn’t a single phone in deployment on a major network. Back in those hoary days, Windows Mobile 6 still dominated, with its desktop-like interface and stylus-driven interaction.

It’s odd to say that, because the idea of “domination” is typically driven by strong user preference, and WM6 never drove much consumer passion, other than for the “idea” of data in your hands, and for the geeks who liked to VPN in to their computer. Sure, that was cool for a sys admin at 2 in the morning.

But for your average mortal who just wanted to check email? DOA.

Smartphones were broken.

Back then, I helped start the Aro Mobile team at Kiha Software to address precisely this problem. We had a choice of platforms to choose from back then. Nokia was still dominant worldwide; Microsoft was promising Windows Mobile 7 any day now; and wacky open-source Linux phones had great ideas, but no delivery model.

Furthermore, Apple had circumvented the usual carrier restrictions with a great new device that had a clear lead in usability and passion — but the iPhone had not yet achieved any sort of dominance, and no enterprise penetration. It was unclear if they’d ever get there. After all, it was a closed platform. Defiantly closed (a la classic Steve Jobs).

But there was a little upstart idea from Google, and its only claim to fame at that time was that it was “open” — the APIs would be exposed, the interfaces well documented to the public, and you could customize to your heart’s content (at least, this was the messaging from Rubin and company).

For a variety of reasons (most of which I can’t share publicly), the Kiha Software team chose Android.

If you look at the market for phones now, it’s rather amazing to see the sea-change that has happened in just the last few years.

Nokia and Microsoft may be getting in bed together, to save both of their fading markets. iPhone has massive penetration across the board, and the iOS is moving to other devices.

And for our Aro Mobile productivity toolset, Kiha made an excellent choice — Android is now the platform to use for all the cool tools, and Apple is locking down their platform evey further, restricting access to all kinds of content (I believe these decisions will ultimately backfire on the iPhone as developers and content owners move in droves over to open platforms).

Today, Google is activating nearly 300,000 Android phones a week. Those partners and content providers who bet on Android are also seeing their fortunes rise with this incoming tide.

Android is rising, and rising!

Check out this chart from BusinessInsider to see exactly how much HTC won when they chose to go with Android and deliver the NexusOne, the EVO and the Incredible: