In the past few weeks I have been playing around with a number of interesting new mobile apps on my iPhone. I have started calling them “Lifestyle apps” for a number of reasons. First of all they are primarily mobile and as such I have them always with me – ready to be used when I whip up my iPhone. Second, they have a very basic and simple use  case – they collect information about how, were and with whom I spend my time. Third, they are inherently social – I can share the above mentioned information with my friends, family and anyone else who cares. They may have different approaches to how they do this but one way or another they know more about my lifestyle than anyone else. So what are they?

OINK
This is a little new app from a company called Milk, started by entrepreneur and investor Kevin Rose. The main idea of Oink is to allow you to rate anything, anywhere. You go around places and Oink stuff. Slowly you build up credibility in certain areas (I am going after hamburgers and coffee) and with the amount of Oinks growing, your opinion matters more and more in rankings of products, services, etc… I guess what the creators are trying to build is a universal ranking system for any experience by mining the user generated Oinks (sounds dirty). The app is beautiful and rather easy to use. There is not much content in it yet (in Europe) so I wouldn’t go there looking for recommendations just yet. But the experience is great and I think they are on to something.

Path
If there was a contest for the most beautiful app on the iPhone (now that I think about it, there probably is) I’d vote for Path. The user experience and design on the new 2.0 version of Path for iPhone are amazing. The core job of Path is to track your life via different types of content you share with the app. At any point in time you can open the app and take a picture, share your location, say who you are with, just write a note and other things. This content is placed on a simple timeline with date and time tags that track you better than the FBI. The idea attracts me because it is much more personal in a sense that you are collecting this information for yourself as a kind of journal. You could in theory go to the app in 20 years and track where you have been and scroll through your encounters and experiences. I don’t see any rankings, recommendations or algorithms that would hint at a business model for the company which actually makes me feel better about the app.

Foursquare
I guess most people have heard of Foursquare by now. If not, know just that it is the first successful location based app that won the contest for THE check-in app against Gowalla (acquired last week by Facebook). This app takes a different approach to your lifestyle than the others – it is about gamefication. You check-in at different locations, score points for various things (100th hamburger joint in 100 days,…), leave tips about them and share with friends. The point I guess is to be the go to place for location. What attracts most people is who leads in the rankings of most check-ins and points, which to be honest is not that big with me. I do check the app for interesting tips when I am traveling though.

Instagram
The last of the apps I will mention may seem more of a photography app than lifestyle. But don’t be fooled – Instagram is one of the most popular iPhone apps because it combines a classy design, artsy feel and easy to use user interface. Taking a picture with it and making it look great is very easy and many people use it as a consequence. But most people don’t realize that an important part of Instagram is the fact that you share your location (if you want) when taking a picture and that you are sharing it on Facebook, Twitter and others. As such Instagram has a trail of where you have been and what did you experience in the form of a beautiful stream of pictures shared on social networks.

So why did I just spend a lot of your time with a simple description of these apps?

Once you start using them you will realize that there isn’t space for 4 of them and trust me there are a lot more of them on the App Store. I felt ridiculous at dinner today, checking in with 4 of them, taking pictures with each and writing different statuses. And I don’t think people want to take a picture, write some text and share their location with each service in the same way. They want a specific simple experience of tracking their lifestyle and sharing it with friends. So I think we will experience a boom of these lifestyle apps in the near term after which there will be consolidation in the market and we will have a few winners and a lot of losers (Gowalla was maybe the first to go, though being acquired by Facebook isn’t bad I guess).  What I do find interesting is the different approaches the four I mentioned have to tackling the same problem. Will the less complex single use case apps like Instagram beat the more sophisticated ones like Path or Oink?

What do you think? Do you track your life in an app?

One more thing: I found really surprising is that I did not use Facebook to check-in, take a picture or write a status update. For me Facebook is not a mobile app. It is too cluttered, crude, generic and confusing. Maybe it is just me but I don’t use it to create content, I just feed it from the other apps. Should that worry Mark Zuckerberg? Maybe, maybe not – he always said Facebook is a platform for sharing and connecting.

Last week Apple released a number updates to its software platforms and applications. The release coincided with the release of the iPhone 4S, the next generation iPhone. I will try to give you an overview of what was released and what are my impressions so far. While I did install iOS5 on an iPhone 4 and an iPad 2, I have yet to hold an iPhone 4S in my hands. Nevertheless I will try to point out some important things about Cupertino’s mobile os.

Notifications are the first one that comes to my mind as they change the way you use your iPhone. Gone are the notification pop-ups that come and then forever disappear. Instead Apple took a lesson from Google’s book and one-up’ed Androids notification center with widget potential. While the only widget in there are Stocks – I believe there is a great opportunity for developers in the future to build amazing apps specifically taking advantage of the new UI. To look at your notifications just swipe top to bottom.

The second one I was looking forward to was iMessage. As I have been a Blackberry user for a long time I have always missed Blackberry Messenger. Now Apple remedied the situation with iMessage. Not only does the iOS messaging app now support texting and mms but also a messenger system between all iOS5 users including iPod Touch and iPad owners. BBM is officially getting its ass kicked. While it may take a while till everyone upgrades it will be much faster than you might expect. One downside of iMessage is that in its default settings Apple decided that if you don’t have a data connection at the time of writing an iMessage your message will instead be sent as a SMS. This has cost me some roaming messages but can be turned off in the settings. I would have preferred to have it off by default.

I have always considered the Lockscreen of the iPhone to be the most under utilized real-estate on the iPhone. We the changes to the notifications that changes as now the Lockscreen can display up to 10 last notifications which makes it immensely useful. Not only that – you can now switch to the Camera app directly from the Lockscreen as well as manage the music you are playing.

iCloud is kind of a disappointment to me. I have expected something fully baked from Apple but I kind of get where they are at. iCloud allows you to wirelessly sync purchased music, apps, pictures and backup your iPhone or iPad to the cloud. This is obviously cool but in this day and age nothing revolutionary. I was actually looking forward to Documents in the Could – a wireless solution that allows me to forget the file system. Don’t get me wrong it works exactly as advertised – on iPhone and iPad. Apparently Apple failed to mention that iWork for Mac is not yet ready for the wireless sync fest and as such the feature Documents in the Cloud is only useful when you are moving between iOS devices. The moment you want to use a Mac it is back to download => edit => upload to iCloud. I bet a new version of iWork with full support for iCloud is in the works as well as an API for developers but until then iCloud is not ready for prime.

Cutting the cord was also a feature I was looking forward to. Not only do I hate syncing via cable but the way Apple implemented wireless sync means I don’t need to explicitly say please sync or back up. When I open iTunes and have my iPhone on the network it will immediately show up and sync. And did I mention iOS updates are from now on incremental and OTA? Awesome.

These are basically the things I find interesting in iOS5. There is plenty more but I have reserved some features for a review of the iPhone 4S. I will try to get my hands on one asap so that I can try out Siri and the new camera. I think these two features alone and the bump in speed make the iPhone 4S a worthwhile upgrade. But that is for another time and another post.

As many of you know, Google agreed to acquire Motorola Mobility (the mobile spin-off of Motorola) for $12.5 billion. What makes this move interesting is the fact that it is a supplier buying one of its vendors. Motorola has committed a few years back to a single OS strategy for its mobile products with Android being the OS. As such you can see that the company was already deep in the Android camp. Now why would a company like Google do this? Andy Rubin, the lead behind Android at Google, has said before that Google would never build phones but today it seems that is precisely what they are doing. What's up with that?

A few months ago I wrote a post on the strategic partnership Nokia and Microsoft entered into. My conclusion was that the move by Nokia was motivated by the fact that the competition between Android smartphone manufacturers was driving the ASPs down and that the only way to survive was to differentiate itself from he rest of the pack. Windows Phone 7 was that differentiation and gave Nokia the opportunity for relevance again. While the outcome of that is not yet known I stand by that assessment.

Google's acquisition of Motorola is in a sense similar. Motorola is struggling and while it did have some great phones (the Droid family) it has made losses in the past few quarters and was left behind by the likes of HTC or Samsung. I completely understand why they agreed to the acquisition – 40$ per share is more than anyone else would give for Motorola and is a great return for the shareholders – and it is pure cash.

The reason why Google invested one and a half years worth of net income into this deal is much more complex.

First of all there is the patent thing. The Android ecosystem is under attack for infringing on patents from all directions. Apple, Microsoft and Oracle are gearing up for more and will not relent easily so Google needs to build out its own arsenal of patents to defend it. While the jury is out there whether the infringements are real or not – I'll leave this to the experts – the fact is that Google's future platform may be in jeopardy. Because of lawsuits Samsung is unable to sell its Galaxy S phones and tablets in Australia and Europe and Oracle seems to be winning in the Java lawsuit where a victory by Oracle would shake the very foundation of Android. Motorola has quite a patent portfolio and while it will not stop the existing lawsuits it may help deter more of the cropping up.

The second reason for the acquisition is in my opinion the fragmentation of the Android ecosystem. There are currently numerous versions of Android out there, each having a different experience and none of them really being able to compete with the iPhone. Google wants a flagship device the likes of the Nexus series. But even the Nexus phones were still phones of partners. By acquiring Motorola Google gains the ability to build the one true Google Phone and replicate the vertically integrated experience of Apple.

Unfortunately I don't think it is a good move. First of all if Android does really infringe on the IP of other big players Google could have settled that before, but by dumping  the free OS on to the market without making deals before – it forced the hands of Apple, Microsoft and others. Motorola's patent portfolio will help in the defense but it will still be very costly, and with more lawsuits Android will become one hell of an expensive business. How many ads does Google have to sell to get that back?

Google wants to run Motorola as a separate business but I don't believe that can work very well. If they want to get this integrated experience they will need to work very closely together. And we all know how difficult post-M&A integration  is. Getting a real return on this investment will be very difficult. Some pundits mentioned that technically Google does not need to make Motorola profitable but again here I don't agree. What point is there to have a separate business to build the best of the best smartphones and not to have it to make money? If the flagship phones can not make money – which can?

And what will Samsung, LG and HTC do? They are the reason Android has been successful and they got royally screwed. Google just put them into the position of just another not-Googley Android phone manufacturer. While Google got statements from them saying how happy they are – is that reality or a PR stunt? Read them and you tell me. Microsoft is already opening their doors to all the manufacturers and stating they are the only open platform left. And after this move by Google – it may sound as an interesting proposition to the Asian OEMs.

I love reading good quality news and reports online. I haven't bought a newspaper in a long time and even on the Vlerick campus – where the Herald Tribune, Wall St. Journal and the Financial Times are available for free – I rarely touched them. On the other hand I pay for FT.com and read it religiously. For a long time newspapers did not get how people consume content online. But that is changing quickly. 2 cases in point:

1. The New York Times – Skimmer version – http://www.nytimes.com/skimmer/ - for the Desktop

This app is perfect for skimming through the news quickly. The basic view has a very clear and perfectly readable layout with high quality text. The user interface is very easy to use and straightforward. I love it.

2. The Financial TImes web app for Mobile http://app.ft.com

The Financial Times decided – in light of the new rules set by Apple for publishers – to use a web app to deliver content to mobile devices. The app is simple to use, syncs all current edition articles for offline viewing and is easy to navigate. A pleasure to use on the iPhone.

So my point? If you are a newspaper you better have a great reading experience online – desktop, tablet and mobile. If you do – I and many others are willing to pay premium.

In the past few days 2 interesting bits of information were released by RIM and Google.

• Google released the Google Apps connector for Blackberry Enterprise Server
• RIM released the Gmail enhanced plugin for Blackberry Internet Service

Now this would normally be cool but well nothing special. But in the past weeks many have wondered whether RIM is capable of keeping up with the competition, especially the iPhone. For me these releases are signs that RIM acknowledges the shortcomings of it’s current platform and is not hiding it’s head in the sand. The fact that Google has released it’s connector for the Blackberry Enterprise Server means that there are enough installations of BES on top of Google Apps already that this combo needs to be taken seriously. The company I work for does in fact run on Google Apps so I am very happy about both of these releases.

One big advantage that RIM has in the fight vs the iPhone and other competitors is it’s push infrastructure. Not only is it quite unique even today but also it’s infrastructure is spread well and built up for the future. The most important thing now for RIM is to consider this not as a locked up proprietary service but to open it up to developers to build great apps on. Although the Blackberry SDK is already out there for some time many argue it is yet to be powerful enough to build serious apps on. The success or failure of the Blackberry platform depends on this as in regards to hardware – the berries themselves were always great devices.

And this brings me to my last point. RIM started a developer blog recently (11/08/2009) which is again an indication of where they are heading. Since it’s start it had 10 post in 10 days each rich with detailed information for developers. These guys mean business.

The most current post is about the new Blackberry 5.0 SDK beta that is now available to developers. If you read through the feature list the key from my perspective is

Push API

(net.rim.blackberry.api.push.*)

Makes using Push APIs even easier and more powerful for developers.

This is exactly what I meant earlier. The best move for RIM now is to empower it’s developer community with the access to the unique features of it’s platform. Apple only recently released it’s push functionality and compared to RIM it has still a long way to go.

In the past weeks I have been considering getting an iPhone 3GS to supplement my Blackberry Bold because I felt the Blackberry platform stagnating. Not anymore. I have high hopes for the Blackberry and I also wish the rumors about the browser upgrades are true. Full Flash/Silverlight capabilities on the Blackberry? iPhone beware!

I am writting this post on my Blackberry Bold via the WordPress app for Blackberry (latest beta build). It’s easy to use, very fast and gets the job done. Not sure how the formatting will work and I got no spell-check but anyway…

…Clicking the publish button…