Incrementalism

I really enjoyed Jeff Nolan's article entitled "Incrementalism and The New New Thing ". It was also a sentiment echoed by Om Malik in a blog post referring to Jeff's article.

It is a thought that I am sure a lot of us have had for a while. The 2.0 startup crowd seems to have adopted a "With A Twist" strategy. i.e. Take a look at what website is hot and build a clone with a slight twist. The twist, more often than not, is nothing more than an improvement or added feature in the service. Real innovative web services are still few and far between. Now either we are running out of big ideas or entrepreneurs are just trying to make a quick buck. I really hope it is the latter.

On the flip side, it is kind of interesting that two of the biggest things to blow up in the past two years, Facebook and Twitter, still have to find a viable business model.

Apple's World Domination Ambitions

A couple days ago John's Blog added an entry about Apple and the recent software update addition. It has people up in arms.

Their worries? The fact that Apple was kind of underhanded in the way they were trying to get users to start using Safari as their browser. But can you really blame them? They were just leveraging their domination in one area of the desktop to try to get into another vertical. Any company worth their salt will try things like this. Although I do think they should have been more upfront about it and not try to sneak it in as a software update to iTunes. A splash dialog maybe?!?!?

More important is what all this signals. It seems that this is just the latest salvo in the war that Apple is waging on Internet user with the ultimate goal of dominating the Internet. Other shots included the iPhone itself, only being able to develop web apps on the iPhone(at least initially), no Flash, and Safari's move to Windows, among others.

But why? Because they want developers to think of the Mac/iPhone platform first when building the next killer web app. Initially only allowing developers to develop web apps on the iPhone was specifically designed to encourage this. When the next must have web app runs best using a mac or iPhone, people will be encouraged to buy those products. Think monopoly. This may not be all bad because Apple does build awesome products, but diversity is the Spice of life.

Let's just hope they don't try to develop their own Flash like platform or start encouraging developers to put "Best Viewed in iPhone" tags at the bottom of pages. Hehe.

Superb Attention Grab

Paul Kedrosky's blog entry entitled "Google Announces Layoffs" is simply brilliant! ...well the title is brilliant at least anyway.

A throwback to the practice of old media, it makes you go WHAT!!! and forces you to immediately click on it to find out more.

Hehe, Mr. Kedrosky, you got me.

MyTexMoCo

Hi Everyone,

We just released a beta product called MyTexMoCo. Basically it is a script that you insert into your webpage or profile page such as Facebook, MySpace or Friendster. People visiting your page can send and receive text(SMS) messages to and from you even if they don't know your cell phone number.

Currently it is only available to Syner-G users. For more information, log into your account at the Gabriel-tech homepage then click on the Syner-G Apps button. Or check this out.


Thanks,

GTECH

Yahoo!

PinoyTechBlog reported yesterday that Yahoo! is setting up an office in the Philippines. Very cool considering all that is happening with Yahoo! right now. Just recently I read somewhere that one thousand people were let go in Yahoo! in the US.

I guess they are making a pretty penny from the Philippine community. Yehey!!! Uh... I mean Yahoo!!!