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At the most recent Apple keynote , Steve Jobs announced Apple's upcoming advertising platform called iAd . Included as a part of the OS 4.0 update, the mobile operating system upgrade due out for iPhone this summer and iPad later this fall, the iAd system aims, in its very Apple-ly way, to make mobile advertisements "delightful," meaning ads worth clicking on, engaging with and viewing. What Jobs didn't mention, though, is how Apple plans to give iAd its head start: by kicking out the competing analytics and advertising platforms now thriving in nearly every iPhone app today. Or so it seems. Sponsor Developer Reports App Store Rejection Due to Analytics Inclusion Last week, technology news blog VentureBeat caught wind of a story where Apple had rejected an iPhone application because it, according to the email sent to the developer, "is not appropriate for applications to gather user analytics." Not appropriate, you may ask? Since when? Apparently since Apple released their updated iPhone Developer Agreement. Alongside the SDK 4 beta , made available shortly after the announcement in early April, the developer contract was updated, too. Specifically, the clause in question, section 3.3.9, reads, in part (more here ): Notwithstanding anything else in this Agreement, Device Data may not be provided or disclosed to a third party without Apple's prior written consent. Accordingly, the use of third party software in Your Application to collect and send Device Data to a third party for processing or analysis is expressly prohibited. To date, the changes detailed in this clause have been overshadowed by the one preceding it - in Section 3.3.1, Apple banned the use of cross-compiler tools for building iPhone applications, like the one Adobe was just about to ship , for example. But in the long run, it's Section 3.3.9 that may have more impact on the industry as a whole. "FEAR" You may have not heard too much about this change because no one actually knows what's going on thanks to Apple's par-for-the-course policy of refusing to clarify its meaning. Plus, the companies who may be the most heavily affected by an analytics ban - services like Flurry , MediaLets , Motally , Localytics , and SimpleGeo , to name a few - don't want to talk about it. On record that is. But after a dozen or so phone calls and emails, we're starting to see a picture forming and it can be summed up in one word: FEAR . "Nobody wants to be the canary in the coal mine," one source told us, referring to the radio silence we're getting from these companies when you would have otherwise expected to hear outcry, or perhaps even anti-competitive claims. Some companies, off-record, say they are afraid to complain . If they do, they could be the next to be banned. Another source reported that a number of their company's clients weren't submitting updates to the iTunes Application Store because they were worried that the updates, with the analytics included of course, would be rejected. Instead, the clients are leaving their older applications in place since it doesn't appear that Apple is going back through all the current apps and booting out those that already include analytics within them. "Maybe the older apps are grandfathered in?" they wondered aloud. The fact that no one knows, not even the big name, big box retailer that sits at the top of the latter's client list, is a testament to how Apple likes to do business. Here's the agreement, read it, sign it...and that's the extent of the communication. As to those who did manage to get someone from Apple to talk about it? The answer was simply: "read the agreement." But if Apple holds true to what's written there, it sounds like it could spell doom for mobile analytics and ad firms, especially the small-time players beloved by independent developers. iAd, Anti-Competitive? What no one will say - again, on record, that is - is that the changes have a whiff of anti-competitive behavior to them. The issue at hand: Apple is preparing to launch iAd, an advertising platform based on the newly-acquired Quattro Wireless technology, a company that was the second choice for Apple after the Admob deal fell through. "We tried to buy AdMob, but Google snatched them up because they didn't want us to have them," Steve Jobs said during the April keynote. "So we bought another smaller company, Quattro. But we're babes in the woods." But these "babes" are toting means guns, some say. A couple companies see the language in section 3.3.9 as a direct shot at AdMob in the same way that the changes in 3.3.1 were a shot at Adobe. That is, instead of allowing Google to get its mobile advertisements onto the iPhone, Apple can keep them out via the new analytics/ad ban. Whether or not that's the case is certainly up for debate. But considering that the Google/AdMob deal is still being researched by U.S. antitrust enforcers, regulators aware of the issue. Word has it that Google even pointed it out to the FTC, just in case. Continue Reading: Next page, "A Second Opinion" A Second Opinion: Privacy Concerns Others, however, say these changes aren't really about analytics, ads and anti-competitive behavior as much as they are about privacy concerns. In speaking with Alan Chapell, chairman of the Mobile Marketing Association Privacy Committee and whose firm advises companies on privacy and data strategy, the changes to Apple's agreement have to do more with consumer privacy than anything else. With language that refers to "geo-location" and targeted advertising, a good bit of Section 3.3.9 is about how location-based applications should behave. With the rise of location-based services especially and location-based social tools like Loopt, Foursquare, Gowalla, and others, privacy is at the forefront of everyone's minds these days. ( Including ours ). There are no standards for location based data yet, Chapell explains. No rules about how such data should be used, retained, shared and so on. In addition, Apple is under heavy pressure from regulators to protect the privacy of its customers. And if the third-party analytics providers do something which comprises that privacy, it will be Apple that gets in trouble. "This debate is about privacy and innovation," Chapell notes, "and finding a balance between the two." Unfortunately, even if Apple chooses never to enforce the new rules, explains Chapell, the changes will have an indirect impact on innovation in this area. The next round of ad networks, analytics providers and other in-app data-sharing tools will be less likely to be funded. Not Just Funding at Risk... These changes won't just affect the funding of services like those noted above, though, they could affect how services are developed for the iPhone. Take for example, Xtify , a location-triggered geo-messaging system now available for Android ( previous coverage ). The company's VP of Business Development, Joshua Schmiffman, says they're still figuring out what this all means, but they will have some location-triggered functionality for the iPhone. "We are going to try," he says, "but it may not be exactly 'real time.'" That is, if it ever comes to the iPhone at all. Backup Plans: 1st-Party Analytics, "Trust in Apple" As for Localytics , a small-time analytics provider for mobile apps, the decision is to focus more on the company's soon-to-launch enterprise solution. The upcoming offering will allow application publishers to directly collect and process app analytics data, without going through a 3rd party. Ashish Chordia, CEO and Founder of AppDiscover , an iPhone application development and analytics company, is also generally unconcerned with the changes. "While the wording of the terms in section 3.3.9 is quite strict, Apple will not enforce this specific term," he writes in an email. "Enforcing this term would mean rejecting a huge number of apps. Moreover these analytic services are very important for a healthy market for free / ad-supported apps, so that there can be transparency behind the CPM / CPA pricing." On a call, he tells us that several of the company's analytics-enabled apps have made it into the App Store since the agreement was released. Essentially, Cordia believes that Apple will selectively enforce this restriction, but it won't affect applications like his. "Looking Forward to More Insights" Outside of public statements like those received from Flurry and Motally (the latter: "We've reached out to Apple for clarification and are looking forward for more insights into the policy."), the backchannel whispers are that this whole iAd thing is worrisome right now, but not deadly...at least, not yet. But when reading through the initial hands-on reviews of iAd, like the recent one from ad agency Hill Holiday which spoke of iAd's impressive granularity, there are concerns that Apple wants to now dominate where the third-party analytics providers once did. In the meantime, you can count us among those who are also "looking forward to more insights" from Apple. But we're not holding our breath. Image credits: Toy Story iAd, Hill Holiday ; Steve Jobs, gdgt Discuss
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Is Apple Booting iAd's Competition from the iPhone?
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Drupal's founder Dried Buytaert has Jive Software in his sights as his company prepares a free Drupal distribution called "Drupal Commons." Drupal Commons by Acquia will integrate groups, discussion forums, blogs, wikis and events into one package.In a blog post , Buytaert says Acquia will compete generally with social business software but in particular he points out Jive Software. Sponsor Buytaert is one of Acquia's founders. According to Buytaert , Acquia is deveoping a network of cloud-based distributions to "deliver a wide variety of electronic services intended to be useful to people developing and operating Drupal websites. An example such service is an automated upgrade/update service, an uptime and performance monitoring / reporting service, a configuration management service, etc." Why Buytaert points out Jive Software comes in part due to Jive's recent attacks on Drupal. Jive recently wrote a report outlining its case for why it has a competitive advantage over Drupal. Buytaert writes: "Drupal Commons is also a good response to some of the FUD that Jive Software has been spreading about Open Source software, and Drupal in particular. The screenshot below, taken from a Jive Software whitepaper, shows how they position themselves against Drupal, and how they justify charging million dollar license fees to their customers. I don't know about you, but we'd love to show how Drupal can run circles around Jive SBS for a lot less money." Drupal offers modules that can do what a social software provides.But the modules have to be integrated. Drupal Commons will be a pre-packaged service. Buytaert concludes: "Without Drupal distributions, we won't be able to successfully compete with commercial vendors. Drupal distributions have great potential, but we have to do them right, and we have to figure out how to make them sustainable." Discuss
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Drupal Founder Takes on Jive Software
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The guardians of the Linux Kernel Archive , repository for the source code for the Linux open source operating system, turned the code for Google's Android phone out the door last year. The guardians felt they were getting too little cooperation from Google and too few patches from its engineers. However, at the Linux Collaboration Summit, taking place today and tomorrow in San Francisco, Google has apparently broached the topic of bringing it all back home. Sponsor Both Jim Zemlin, Executive Director of the Linux Foundation, and Chris DiBona, open source and public sector engineering manager for Google, reportedly believe it will be done. DiBona, however, told a reporter that he believed the restoration would be a "multi-year process." DiBona even told ZDNet's Paula Rooney that Google was hiring two engineers just to work on the kernel. He dismissed worries over forking and fragmentation, "noting that smart phone operating system code is not all appropriate for the operating system kernel." In fact, that seems to lie at the kernel of the fuss over the kernel, the fact that Google, he says, is shipping millions of Androids per day. The exigencies of the profit-driven corporation and the clean code values of the guardians don't seem like they will ever fit together seamlessly. Top photo by Paolo Massi Bottom photo by Seth Rasmussen Discuss
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Android and Linux Discuss Code Reunion
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The New York Times' new Doc Viewer 2.0 is, depending on what you value, either a pasted-on ornament of no real use to a typical news consumer, or it's an open-source, crowd-sourcing game changer. With information-taming technologies like search engines already at a reader's fingertips, there is debatable value in the Doc Viewer's ability to annotate a story with "raw" information. However, the fact that the Doc Viewer's code is due to be released on an open-source basis introduces an additional value to it. It is not just the back-end that a media source, of whatever size, will have access to, but the whole megillah. Sponsor Want annotated source materials embedded in your kitty blog without having to churn code until the tears flow? You can do it. This latest viewer by the New York Times is the latest iteration of a two year development process. The viewer allows reporters to augment stories by including evidentiary documentation and providing context to news stories. The viewer keys documents to words or phrases in the source story, allowing viewers to pursue the process to the depth they prefer. These "annotations" are similar to an old-fashioned "hot link" but with a new-fangled dynamic delivery. Future versions will open up the annotation process to readers, instead of just the writers and editors. Additional features may include an embeddable version for blogs, a search-friendly version without JavaScript, variable image file type control and the ability to create custom annotation shapes. The open-source software behind Version 2.0 will be released "in the very, very near future," according to the newspaper, and will be available on the Times' Github page. The key criticism to this undertaking, of course, is: so what? BayNewswer quoted Aron Pilhofer, the paper's editor for interactive newsroom technologies, as "recognizing that news organizations are slowly but gradually becoming more and more like technology companies." They are, that is, more likely to triumph if they leverage a wider distribution of invested community members. Alan McLean, interface engineer at the Times, says his focus is on the Doc Viewer as a reporting tool. "Fundamentally what we are trying to do here is get as many tools in the belts of reporters as we can to assist them in telling stories online," he told RWW. "Seeing it as a publishing platform is somewhat limited. It really depends on the kind of content that is being published." However, Chris Heisel , in a post on an earlier version of this viewer, said, "In a world where I can easily find more information than I can ever possibly use does the public really need more access to raw information." We read news in a politically and socially polarized environment. The most common charge against the NY Times - this most mainstream of MSM - is bias, that there is nothing more than a writer's unexamined feelings or political secret sauce to support the angle of a given story. With foundational documents appended to the story itself, the reasonableness of the reporter's approach should prove easier to determine. But that is posited on the not-altogether-likely notion that reason and reality will overpower the desire to froth. The New York Times is a syndication partner of ReadWriteWeb. Discuss
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New York Times Juices Up Its Document Viewer
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The AFP is reporting that the person who leaked internal business documents from Twitter Inc. to the blog TechCrunch last July is also the same person who compromised the Twitter accounts of Barack Obama and other celebrities last year. A 25-year-old who went by the name "Hacker Croll" has been tracked down and arrested in France by French authorities, with the assistance of the FBI. It's not clear from the report what charges are to be filed. Reportedly, the FBI alerted France to the man's presence in that country almost a year ago, in the same month the internal documents were leaked. Sponsor The media report doesn't make mention of the leaked documents, only the illicit takeover of Obama's account. "Hacker Croll" was identified as the source of the controversial files, though. It seems possible that these two incidents are being improperly connected, but the report filed indicates they were carried out by the same person. We've reached out to both Twitter and TechCrunch for comment. When the documents were sent to TechCrunch, that blog deliberated publicly at length about whether it had a journalistic obligation to publish or suppress them. Founder Michael Arrington in the end decided to work with Twitter executives to identify the most sensitive documents but published other, less sensitive information days later. The resulting blog posts provided a very interesting look into the thinking of one of the most important companies on the Internet, but proved severely damaging to TechCrunch's reputation with people in the industry who considered the decision to publish them an unacceptable betrayal. TechCrunch argued that it was within its legal rights to publish the information, and the law breaking had been done by the person who sent them the files. Now that person is apparently headed to trial. The ethical and perhaps legal implications of TechCrunch's decision will no doubt be discussed again due to this turn of events. The one clear lesson from all this that no one can argue with, though: Don't mess with Twitter or the FBI will hunt you down where ever you may be around the world. Discuss
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Twitter Hacker, TechCrunch Document Leaker, Arrested in France
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