What I’ve Been Reading

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  • [amazon_link id=“1593156456” target=“_blank” ]Mobilize: Strategies for Success from the Frontlines of the App Revolution[/amazon_link]. Centered on the iOS platform, it’s a good guide from an experienced marketeer on how to profit from the land grab that is mobile application development. A more quantitative approach would have fit better. Very useful.
  • [amazon_link id=“0399535934” target=“_blank” ]The Phone Book: The Curious History of the Book That Everyone Uses But No One Reads[/amazon_link]. A history of the impact on society of the phone book: it was as important as the Internet is today, introducing a whole new way to relate to the world. Just like now, if you weren’t on the phone book, you didn’t exist. Déjà vu all over again.
  • [amazon_link id=“0321549252” target=“_blank” ]Surreptitious Software: Obfuscation, Watermarking, and Tamperproofing for Software Protection[/amazon_link] Written in an academic way, but full of practical examples  at the same time, you’ll love this one if you, like me, write meta-code, code that does funky things to other code. Loved the “Dynamic Watermarking”  and “Hardware for Protecting Software” chapters.
  • [amazon_link id=“0201038048” target=“_blank” ]The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 4A: Combinatorial Algorithms, Part 1[/amazon_link]. Archimedes started combinatorics 2200 years ago, and Knuth wrote the definitive review of its algorithms. Beautiful typesetting, timeless selection of algorithms and full of examples to master the subject: a masterwork.

Doom&Gloom for MNOs: The Writing’s on the Wall

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These graphs show when carriers might expect to see costs exceed revenues, based on a new Tellabs study. Currently, stock markets don’t reflect these predictions, with Forward PE ratios at about 10.
Important assumptions of the underlying model are: a traffic growth of seven fold by 2015 for both voice and data combined, with a revenue decline per gigabyte of 80–85%; and data transport using only GSM/3G technologies (HSPA/HSPA+), since LTE will not be widely deployed by 2015. There also are some questionable assumptions: a flat-rate pricing model (telcos will lobby their way out of this trap) and a high percentage of data offloading onto indoor networks, a key assumption of the model, being a big unknown.

Mobile telcos will experience massive profit compressions in the future, redefining the value chain that has been in existence for almost two decades: network equipments and mobile terminal manufacturers with almost zero profit margins, whilst MNOs enjoyed high margins. Profits are migrating toward new smartphone services, but that it’s a history for another post.

Cloud (computing) on Fire!

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Iridiscent cloudsCloud computing is badly broken, by default. And it won’t be solved anytime soon, no matter what server-side countermeasures or architectural patterns are deployed. Blame JavaScript, or rather, blame its abusers. JavaScript sandbox and security model wasn’t designed for the current cloud-computing architectures: sure, the Same Origin Policy prevents scripts running on pages originating from one site to access to documents, methods and properties from other sites, but this same policy is not valid for the script themselves. Furthermore, JavaScript is a dynamic, global language: therefore, scripts from different sources in the same webpage have equal access rights to the webpage and to each other, opening the possibility to change each other’s functions and variables.

Attack methods and vectors are plentiful: XSS, CZS, CSRF and DNS attacks, among others. The chain is too long and too weak, the responsibilities are too distributed:  cloud-computing architectures are not trading off CAPEX for OPEX, they are trading off CAPEX for OPEX AND security. The modern cloud computing movement got started when Amazon internally validated the architecture and started offering it to the public via AWS, but extending that to the browser with JavaScript from multiple sites within the same webpage is going too far.

Compromise google-analytics.com and not only the whole web are yours, but the whole privacy and documents offered through services like Google Docs and intranets all over the world.

Julian Assange, The Hacker Formerly Known As Proff

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marry (v.)
c.1300, from O.Fr. marier, from L. maritare “to wed, marry, give in marriage,” from maritus “married man, husband,” of uncertain origin, perhaps ult. from “provided with a *mari,” a young woman, from PIE base *meri- “young wife,” akin to *meryo- “young man” (cf. Skt.  marya- “young man, suitor”). Said from 1530 of the priest, etc., who performs the rite.

In my early teens, I remember compiling and using the zapper marry.c, a little tool to clean your entries from utmp/wtmp/lastlog/acct/pacct UNIX files. It was written by Julian Assange, who also wrote strobe.c, the first open source port scanner. I wonder to this day why he chose such a name for a zapper, doesn’t that deserve a Wikileak?

Rich&King: Solving the Founder’s Dilemma

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Every tech entrepreneur faces the same dilemma: raise as much as capital as needed to grow as fast as possible, while avoiding dilution. The tradeoff was quantified by Noam Wasserman in a study of 460 startups, showing that in general, refusing to release control only harms the business and the entrepreneur itself:

The Rich-vs-King Tradeoff

Even so, entrepreneurs, hopeful creatures by nature, keep on searching whatever hack that gives them an edge to reduce dilution. But the biggest hack is, and always will be, possessing perfect time-to-market skills, the entrepreneurial quality per se. And whilst founders usually manage to keep 5–15% shares after IPO, some do much better, vg: Bill Gates(40.2%), Pierre Omidyar(30%) and Larry Ellison(27.5%). Another interesting case is Google, where founders keep control using Class B shares with super-voting rights (1‑to-10) to offset that each one only managed to keep 13.4% of the company, and Netscape, where Jim Clark kept 25.5% of the shares vs. 2.6% of Marc Andreessen (maybe it has something to do with Clark keeping only 3% after IPO of Silicon Graphics, his previous startup).  But it’s outside the tech industry, where we find the quirkiest scheme to keep control, Kamprad’s IKEA.

Mobile Platforms: The Future isn’t Cast in Stone

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Android is in exponential growth as shown in the next graph,

Canalys figures for Worldwide smartphone shipments

But remember, it’s a platform only 2.5 years old, so let first PC-history be our guide:

 

 

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And the final result of that era of computing, summarized in the following graph showing total market share as percentages,

PC market share through the years

And even though prediction markets are being used within corporations to peer into the future of these questions, they are of no use for making public predictions about future platform market shares due to their very low volumes and the enormous cash on the balance sheets of the tech companies involved, that is, the results would be too easy to subvert to ever be trusted.

So beware! Keep your development options open!