ACT Mobile Privacy Panel at SXSW
ACT's Jonathan Godfrey is moderating a panel today at the Austin tech convention, South by Southwest. Selected from thousands of applicants, the panel "Can Washington Make Your App Illegal" addresses widespread concern about potential future regulation of the app industry. Godfrey is joined by Mike Sax of Asigo and Ahmed Siddiqui of Go Go Mongo and Startup Week. A number of presentations in Austin have focused on the unintended negative impact that government intervention may have on the app industry. [...]
The New iPad’s Pros and Cons for App Developers
App developers are excited about the latest tablet release from Apple. We have created over two hundred thousand apps for the iPad which has proved to be an exceptional tool for entertainment, productivity, personal health, and early education. With 55 million iPads sold, and 25 billion iOS apps downloaded, it is a great platform for developers. Providing over $4 billion in revenues for developers, Apple’s continued development of hardware to support iOS is incredibly valuable to app makers. Incorporating quad-core [...]
There’s an app developer for that
Apple released figures yesterday touting its impact on the job market. Its study revealed that the tech giant has created 514,000 jobs, over 210,000 of those related directly to Apple's mobile products. Curiously, Apple chose a late Friday for this release – a time less likely to receive attention outside of trade press since most reporters had already filed their stories for the weekend editions. Despite Apple's low-key announcement of this news, it is a very big deal for developers. [...]
ATT Decision: A Train We Could See Coming
Yesterday, AT&T announced that they would effectively end truly unlimited data plans by throttling all users who exceed 3 gigabytes per month of 3g or 5 gigabytes per month on 4G LTE. This comes just as app makers are facing the daunting reality that they will have to upgrade the graphical displays of their iPad apps to the high resolution required for Apple's newest tablet release. In many cases this will double the size of their apps and make it [...]
Privacy vs. The Behemoth
Today we've seen major news coverage about the Administration's blog post on the new Privacy Bill of Rights, and the fact that one of the first areas to be covered is mobile apps. As we all know, mobile apps are developed by small companies, without armies of lawyers or privacy experts; and yet we are first in line for new rules and oversight. As a participant in the multi-stakeholder process, I'm looking forward to the series of conference calls and [...]
Addressing the Conspiracy Theorists Who Believe in Spectrum Hoarding
[Crossposted from CNET] So here are some basic facts, and some pretty clear suppositions: 1. Data use by mobile devices has exploded -spectrum is the transmission medium for the data explosion 2. The transmission of data over a band of spectrum is limited by several things, including power of the transmitter, distance the information must travel, interference patterns, even atmospheric conditions 3. There are laws of physics limitations to how much data you can fit in a given [...]