It's been 2 months since my last blog – too long! One of my new years resolutions is to get my thoughts down into the blog on a bi-weekly basis!!!
I normally reflect on what technology I thought might succeed, what parts of my analysis went wrong and what I think will happen in the coming year. I've never been so public about it before, as making predictions in technology can be very hit and miss My biggest error was with Blackberry, several years ago I remember in a conversation with a colleague I mentioned that blackberry were in trouble once Nokia and the likes started adding proper email clients to their devices. Blackberry must have already known this and have since diversified and expanded it's product some what! Never the less I find it constructive and good to set focus for the year ahead.

Last year was very much the year of the netbook I believe. This one product has directly effected
the profitability of the most powerful software company in the world, Microsoft. It's caused them to change there vista evolution policy, the per seat license cost, and even in the past month the Microsoft Office suit can now be purchased for 70 pounds! I believe none of this would have happened if it was not for a very big gamble which paid off for Asus the Taiwan hardware manufacturer. They produced a small, cheap, robust computer that came pre-installed with a Linux OS, and a bunch of open source software that lets you do most of the things you need to do on a small computer. I would love to have been a fly on the wall to hear the comments at the meeting room when some engineer suggested that they use Linux as the OS once the guys from Redmond refused to supply them with a version of XP! You don't have to be a rocket scientist to guess what company I invested in two years ago! I just hope 'Jonney Shih' keeps on doing what he's doing!
Despite the initial Linux success on Netbooks, XP has been slowly catching up. Hence when last year people were saying 'this is the year Linux moves mass market' they were half correct! You would be hard pushed to find a Netbook with Linux on the machine in a Spanish shop, however many places in the UK are still stocking both.


What about this year?

I see Netbooks push the profitability of many high end laptops. So company's like Sony and Mac who have expensive powerful small Notebooks may find customers preferring to make do with the cheaper UMPC.
I think Microsoft will probably push Linux further from the small machines, but in the later half of the year I see another big surge in Linux. There are two reasons for this:


Reason One

Once you allow people the flexibility of a Netbook they have an expectation and need to just pick up the thing and use it. The machine I'm using now to write this is the Acer Aspire One, it takes probably around 10-15 seconds to boot from cold. ASUS already have a 'Linux on a chip' technology on many of their motherboards which allows a rapid boot in under two seconds. Another Japanese embedded developer Lineo has created a rapid linux boot system which they claim to boot in under 3 seconds. Now having a machine that let's you surf, email, doc and spread sheet without the wait time is fantastic! This should be a very user compelling piece of functionality to have. I think the Linux solution is a good 9 months ahead of Microsoft in this respect.


Reason Two

Semi-conductor chip competition is forcing two worlds together. The PC world are now building smaller low powered processors like the Intel Atom to power the UMPC devices. This is now encroaching into the Embedded device chip makers territory. It's only a matter of time before the likes of ARM push up into the world of personal computing. In the ultra mobile world I believe battery life is king, this gives ARM a large advantage, and with the recent deal with ARM and Canonical to produce a Ubuntu Linux distribution for it's new cortex architecture it means another feather in the proverbial bow for Linux.


This leads me on nicely to what I think could be a potential growth area. Software applications for the Netbooks of course! There is a whole new class of device with not many paid for app's. How many games can you buy for your Netbook then? How many people will be using those devices that are Linux based in the next two year. Add to this a credit crunch and a very cost conscious consumer, people will be voting with the pocket in the coming year, another reason to use the Linux OS.
Mobile operators like Vodafone :-) could also see some value in this market. Linux gives them complete control of the OS on the device unlike having Window installed. Making for a very compelling proposition to the consumer.


So in a nutshell, Linux on UMPC's is big in the later part of the year, some growth in the Linux games and paid for app's market. A big push by ARM to get a mention in this space. For smart devices I expect more from Android compatible hardware in the early part of the year. Hopefully we may see some app's for this platform on Betavine in the next 6 months? For the Linux section of Betavine I expect we shall see more app's that ease integration of Mobile data services with UMPC's but who knows!

If you have any views why not drop a line and please let me know.

At Betavine my job as cantered around Linux. In the past few months the question of Linux Netbooks being ready for mass market has been discussed in circles around the business. Being an advocate I've always been pro-Linux. However I decided to conduct an experiment of my own! I broke down a number of functions that your typical user might want to do on a Netbook, and see if my children could do this without guidance. And this is what happened!

The computers used were an out the box ASUS EeePC.

1) Start the computer and connect to wifi.

-This should be easy, and I think that many children now are familiar with connecting to a wifi network and what it is.
-They had no problem with this. Already familiar with a task bar, and an icon which indicates a radio signal they were both able to open up the dialogue and find the 'sky net' network. (By the way, let your children pick a name for your Wifi network and in tests 8 of 10 children pick the word 'sky net'!!!!). They were connected and everything was fine so far!

2) Start a web browser and browse to their favourite site.

-Again this should be an easy task and sure enough both identified the firefox logo, started the application and were off.

3) Write a short doc on any word processor that they can find.

-This caused a bit of confusion. One headed straight to Google-docs, and soon realised this was not what they expected. After a little play with the tabs, both hit the documents tab and found something that looked like word, smelt like word, worked like word, and felt like word. Children being children, never question and just do! They both had a couple of lines written and closed the Open Office word processor.

4) Copy a file from the computer to any other medium.

-I got a bit of a surprise here. I expected a few questions around micro SD cards etc... They have seen this type of device in my camera and phone but not really being used in a computer, would they search for a slot? Question what it was? Ask for help in what to stick in this slot once the found it? No on every count! One of them ran into their bedroom room pulled out a USB memory stick from their computer, rammed it into the USB slot and started searching for a file explorer application! Within a few seconds the 'Removable Drive' window opened and they selected open file explorer!
The ASUS shows a window which looks very much like MS Windows file explorer, with My Eee PC directory-> My Documents -> Z-Pen. So it was zero pain here for having to learn and understand the /home/user/ file structure of Linux. The quickly copied the test. Open office also saved it as 'test.doc' so again there would be no pain in opening it in Windows Word.

5) Do a very simple spread sheet of the 2 times table.

-This test was done by the older of the two, as the youngest did not know what a spreadsheet was!

Again clear sign posting on the tabbed menu meant the oldest child opened the application named 'spreadsheets' (surprise surprise!). Things were going well. The child opened something that looked like excel, smelt like excel, felt like excel, and behaved like excel! We blow me over with a feather, in his mind it must be 'excel'.... I'm wondering at this point of weather an adult would have headed straight to a 'start' button, or tried searching for something called 'excel' and then given up???


6) Send an IM to me who was now logged on in another room.

-Skype was opened in a jiffy, and in came an IM from the oldest 'this is easy daddy'.... Try telling that to your mother I thought!


7) Open up a picture that I'd put onto a directory on the file system of them on holiday.

-This took a little longer. Children don't class opening up pictures in some graphical editor as 'Play' and this was where the app was! Several minutes were wasted in looking at the 'internet' tab, and the 'work' tab before boredom set it and they both decided to look in the other tabs. Photo manager was soon identified as a possible solution to their problem and the picture was dully opened! Job done!


8) Play some music, and copy a sound snip to be used on another computer and play it.

-The ipod was plugged straight in, Amarok started and allowed playing of the ipod music. This was going much easier than I thought. The youngest found the 'sound recorder' and a sound snip was taken and saved to the z-pen. The app did understand files saved in the WAV format, but I could see that the file was saved as 'test' and no file extension! Windows was not going to identify that as something that could play, and the icon used for the file would not display the typical 'speaker' either!
My suspicions were correct. Our first failure! Upon trying to play the file they were both searching for the speaker icon which identified it as an audio track!

9) Play some video from YouTube.

-Now I was sure this was going to fail. Both my kids were very familiar with using YouTube, so I thought they would know what to do, but I also knew that firefox would display a window about needing a plug-in to play video. On this I was pleasantly surprised, the firefox browser comes installed on the Asus with the plug-in pre-installed! No install pain!

10) Get connected via a Vodafone Mobile Connect card.

-I had taken the liberty of removing the software I had been testing for the previous months! I had to know what they would do when presented with a problem of getting the device working.
After sticking the card in there was a tense period of waiting by the children.... They were now both expecting a pop-up to say a device had been detected (like with the USB memory stick.) ... No joy, it was the Huawei E172, which does not attach as a storage device. The oldest thought he had it cracked:
"I'll open up the file manager, go to the device look for setup.exe and install the software!"
No joy, the device does not show in file manager, and setup.exe would not work anyway even if it did!
A reboot was talked about, discussed then executed (after all this is what you do on a windows machine!... :-) ...) Still no joy!
I suggest looking for the software on the internet with Google. Ok so I cheated, but wanted this to work! The first search was for Vodafone connect card'... Time wasted on this about 8 minutes (In child time that's equal to 2 1/2 hours!) ... The second search was Vodafone usb software' .... Another 8 minutes... The third search was Vodafone help usb datacard' ....
Result! :-).... Up came the following on the second hit:

vodafone forum

A search of the forums and the kids found this...

form post 1

forum post 2
forum post 3

At this point they really were stuck, but they got very very close! They could have used the Network manage straight out the box, but reading items like 'connect with 3g/hsdpa' finally had two small faces looking up at me with a sorry look of failure on the face!
'What's HSDPA Daddy?'
Oh God, why oh why do we keep on making the same mistake!!!!!

So what did betavine learn from this? Linux in many ways is very close to what I call prime time! Installation of software and packages is still not the same as with Windows, and can be perceived as 'difficult' to the new comer. Now I know a lot of purists and the like will shout that the package management system is just fine. But it's no use sticking your head in the sand and hoping the problem will go away. Windows is the defacto standard! For people to start using Linux as a serious competitor to Windows several things have to happen in my mind:
1) Software developers who build applications for Linux should not assume the users has any technical knowledge about computers, and nor should they! The user only wants to use the app or function that the computer exposes!
2) For processes that have to be different due to the Linux architecture, the user has to be given wizards clearly describing everything and/or what must be done differently to get the result they want.

I also believe that companies wishing to do business in this new Operating System will have to embark on a re-think on some of their strategies. It's going to be harder in dealing with support issues at a global level, why? Because there are no dominant players in this market! Hence multi-nationals companies will not be able to hand off this work and declare 'make it so!' They will need to get dirty with many smaller companies to get the results they want. It's not easy and will produce a few headaches, but I think the potential for larger profit margins and working in the Open Source community vastly out-weight the effort.

Regards, Nicholas Herriot

Well it's the first time I've blogged about news that I'm creating myself! But I'm sure all the ASUS EeePC users out there will be happy to know that the new Vodafone Mobile Connect driver will be available via the Betavine repository by tomorrow around 12:00 noon. We have completed our testing of the software against a number of USB cards, and the Asus EeePC 700. This will enable the support of the following new devices:

• MC950D
• K3520
• E3715

I've seen several rather exasperated users trying to get there K3520 cards working! And getting that horrid error message:
"Your device is not properly registered......". The device I'm using now with the new software is the K3520.... So it works!

However in true 'beta' style there are some limitations! Due to the way installation happens new datacard support does not appear (shown in properties dialogue box) unless you remove the '/.vmc2 ' directory from your home directory. On the ASUS that's the directory
So before upgrading open up a terminal window depressing the key's 'ALT' + 'CTRL' + 't' at the same time. From your >/home/user directory remove your hidden /.vmc2 directory using:

Use your synaptic package manager to upgrade or install to the new software. If you can't remember how to do that go here to find out.

Things I've not got round to testing yet is accessing the micro-SD card slot on the K3520.

Going forward we plan on a number of small changes to the Mobile Connect Card to improve it's usability, and bespoke builds for ACER Aspire one, and Dell mini running Ubuntu.

As usual, drop a line if you have an opinion. We would also like to know interest in Dell compared to Acer, so if you do have a preference to which should be done first, again drop a line!

September 2008 will be a key mile stone for Betavine. We have now had over 200,000 downloads of the basic drivers designed to work with Linux distributions such as Debian, Fedora and more. For something that was ment to be a side line activitey, it really is a huge success story for Betavine which went live in Feb 2007.

However this story does not stop here, Betavine are seeing a growing demand for Ultra Mobile PC's (UMPC) and connectivity tools for those devices. With this increase we are also experiencing exponential growth in Data across the network! Betavine have been very proactive and just 4 months ago released a specific driver for the ASUS UMPC. We created a mini repository to allow our users to easily download and install the software using the software package management system built into the device.
When this went live it accounted for less than 1% of monthly downloads. Ultra mobile now account for 8% of monthly downloads. The sector is seeing growth amongst competitors too. ASUS being the first, then the Acer ASPIRE one, and now Dell Inspiron mini 9, which will be directly supported by Vodafone. It looks like 3G now has a killer app! To be more specific, several things have had to happen for this to occur in my opinion:

Flat data tariffs. Enabling people to browse without fear of ramping up enormous bills;

HSDPA connections enabling high download speeds comparable with Broadband ISP's;

Introduction of cheap Netbook like PC's. Bringing the price of this type of device within the grasp of anyone;

The price of the OS and standard packages becomes less than 15% of the total bill of materials; and

Small cheap and unobtrusive USB datacards that can easily give any computer 3G capabilities.


I see this segment of our site increasing in the next 6 months. Our plans are to include more drivers for different cards and not just our Huawei devices. We are also looking at supporting different devices and allowing users to easily add the software to their systems. Going forward, Betavine will be looking at help pages, sync tools between UMPC and mobile, information and guides, forums, support, engagement with Open Source projects and much more!

If you would like to get involved in anything specific or see something that you think Betavine should get involved in please let me know.

That's not a typo - it looks like Apple's AppStore really is a FatStore when it comes to profit!
Apple's AppStore has been live for just over a month and some of the statistics coming from the online widget shop is staggering! Recent news claim there have been over 60 million downloads of applications from the store. Indicating that there is several downloads for each device that are in the hands of customers! Apple say the site generates over $1 million per day in sales of paid-for software. Doing the maths, this could crack the $1/2 billion mark within a year given that Apple meet sales projections on 3G I-phones. And on that topic - projections for the 3G I-phone - Apple hope to shift over 4.5 million units in the first quarter. That's double what they wanted to achieve for the 2G I-phone.

The stats on applications is also impressive:
Over 1500 applications;
Prices ranging from $9.99 -to- $0.99;

A quote from Bill Jobs says "Who knows, maybe it will be a $1bn marketplace at some point in time. I've never seen anything like this in my career for software."

For me what makes it more amazing is that Apple have managed to encourage thousands of talented software developers to learn their flavour of 'C', the quirks of their device, the SDK's and limitations, research, build, test and develop for their particular piece of hardware. Brilliant! A well executed and delivered proposition. Although in the beginning Apple seemed to be keeping their device closed to software developers. The platform is still proprietary and under Apples control. Apple now have a close relationship between the user and them, really pushing the mobile operator right into the background, merely providing the capability to use the network.

However Apple really need to be careful of how it handles it's reputation in the developer web world. Developers can easily decide to back the real openness of Linux. Current grumblings of how apple maintain tight control on it's app store, with even some applications being 'zapped' (removed) from peoples handsets not due to stability, or viral issues. But to how an app has undercut a proposition in selling a particular product. The 'BoxOffice' app allowed users to look for and buy movie tickets, thus undercutting a ticket service provided by AT&T, a Mobile Operator selling the iPhone!

Unfortunately for developers wanting to jump ship to something that provides the appeal of the iPhone there is nothing much available at the moment.



FreeRunner from the OpenMoko people do provide a totally open piece of hardware, and some of the same features which made the iPhone successful. The device does seem to be losing the race though, with no 3G and needing an injection of money and support. Probably the biggest threat to iPhones dominance will be from Android and HTC's greatly anticipated 'Android supporting' device. The only other possible contender to Apples dominance in this new market will be from LiMo. However sadly I've seen very little thought or engagement to the greater developer community in this respect. LiMo preferring to deal directly with large companies and operators to ensure their technology gets into users hands. A bit of a failing in my mind considering Apple are on track to easily generate $ 1/3 billion in sales in software downloads alone! Looking at Apples Developer portal in terms of quality, thought and execution it's no surprize!

I guess the biggest learn for companies looking in at the Apple AppStore is to build your technology in such a way that tries to 'include' rather than 'exclude' talent. That still seems to be the biggest plus point that the Linux operating system has be it on PC, Ultra Mobile or Mobile devices.

As always you can feedback comments and let me know your views and thoughts on the subject by hitting reply.