Today Google announced the integration of Google Voice into Gmail allowing users to place and receive phone calls from their computer from any place in the world to the US for FREE.

Since the acquisition of GrandCentral by Google, Craig Walker and his team have been working hard to make the world a better place for communication.

One of the targets is to make Google Voice accessible to all users (meaning outside the scope of Google) with an horizontal approach ranging from Mobile phones to Web based applications and device dependent applications as well. Google Voice has been available for Blackberry and Android phones for over a year. But they never could make it to the iPhone. The application went live for a few hours before Apple’s executives decided to remove it from the app store raising a Valley drama on Twitter and Facebook.

Google asked the FCC to look into Apple’s motivation, Apple replied, FCC sent a few letters, AT&T denied any implications…bottom line: nothing happened. In a world where technology is evolving around time, FCC has failed to do its job.

Worse, I believe FCC integrity is challenged by its dependance to regulatory fees mainly paid by carriers and manufacturers e.g. AT&T and Apple. I see an urgent need to reform FCC processes to adapt to 21st century technology pace.

Here is an imaginary open letter from Google to FCC regarding Apple’s Rejection of the Google Voice for iPhone Application.

Adobe is the number one gaming platform for developers. Even if Apple is trying to destroy the company’s future, nothing is really changing.

HTML5 is not the new Flash although for video playback it might be a better solution (or not). But developers have constantly praised Flash for gaming. I’m not saying Flash is perfect, nothing is perfect and there is always place for improvement.

But the acceleration of  hardware miniaturization, the abyssal growth of smart mobile devices, the potential explosion of tablets and the furious competition between Apple and Google (soon Microsoft will join) makes Adobe a key player in this war.

Google –unlike Apple- has decided to work with Adobe on integrating Flash on their proprietary operating system Android and certainly Chrome OS. Their strategy lays before us on multiple announcements issued by Mountain View’s giant in the last week.

Flash Player 10.1 on Google Nexus Ones

Adobe Air coming for Android

Adobe for Google TV

Native PDF integration on Chrome Browser 6

At least 5 different Google’s units – YouTube (largest Flash network), Android, Chrome browser, Chrome OS and Google TV have made deals with Adobe. Hard to believe it’s all happening without top level corporate talks between both companies.

Adobe’s market capitalization has dropped 30% since Steve Jobs has openly called Flash an insecure, CPU killer, crash-inducing add-on. A $5bn insult  – thanks Steve.

Revenues are also on the downside from $3.5bn in 2008 to $2.8bn in 2009.

Google’s market cap is 11 times Adobe’s and would give the search engine company a nice entry in the mobile gaming playground.

Adobe can’t expect a lot as all deals are based on offer and demand. Apple will obviously not make any bid; Microsoft is too far behind in their mobile road map and will bet everything on Xbox/WP7 synergies.

So who else can afford a $15bn GI Joe?

Since I posted a picture of my iPhone unlocked running T-mobile I keep getting DMs, texts and calls on how to do it.

The procedure takes less than 5 minutes. You don’t need a computer. Just your phone and a data connection (wifi strongly suggested).

Open Safari and go to www.jailbreakme.com, unlock the slider and leave the magic take place.

Follow the on-screen instructions. Once rebooted, your device should show a new icon Cydia.

Open Cydia – choose “user settings” when prompted, wait for the refresh

Search for Ultrasn (search icon is on the lower right of the screen).Ultrasn0w should appear. Select the app, install it and let your iPhone reboot.

That’s it. Done. Your iPhone is now unlocked.

Lately I got too busy to blog. Not that working and blogging are incompatible, just that my mind was focused on something else. Few posts are in my draft folder just waiting for a quick review which should happen later this week.

About 18 months ago, Ilan pitched me about his project. From day 1 he had a clear vision on what he wanted to do. I’m honored to be a shareholder of Producteev.

Producteev, a task management start-up from New-York launched their API for developers few weeks ago. The API allows developers to access all of Producteev’s extensive task management features. I am very excited to see where this will take Producteev and encourage you to try your luck at developing something for them.

http://www.producteev.com/developers/

A lot has been written about the iPad and the printing industry. Recently Fred Wilson wrote a post explaining why he doesn’t like the idea of a mobile application but would rather read content on Safari.

His demonstration has some strong point for a power-user but certainly not for the masses. The whole conversation reminds me of the controversy about iPod and music.

Yes, I would basically agree that reading content on a browser is more convenient for me. But reality proves that monetization of digital content via web is complicated.

Apple has created a value added chain of services from publishing to distribution. It’s easy to buy and use.

Newspapers over the world are facing their worse crisis ever. It’s the end of an era. And however we look at it, printing news on paper in 2010 makes no sense.

So will the iPad save the newspaper industry? I think it will. Web content will be limited to headlines, forums, past editions, but premium content will be distributed via apps.

The basic recurring argument saying people won’t pay for content because they can find fresher news freely on the web is just ridiculous. No one buys a newspaper for fresh news. Newspapers are here to bring a deeper, better understanding of the raw information. I don’t think Fred Wilson buys The New York Times to find anything new. He cares about the analysis, the vision brought by journalists and experts.

iPad distribution of newspaper solves many problems:

-       production cost [printing]
-       distribution
-       reachability
-       interactivity
-       loyalty
-       spontaneity

When it comes to market ipad/iphone study I turn to my mother. She discovered emails 2 years ago and never wrote a letter since. Same for the iPhone, which never leaves her sight. iPad has dramatically change the way she reads news and this is just the beginning. I bet newer devices will upgrade the digital experience to unprecedented levels.

Apple brought to the masses what the web failed to provide. SECURITY. My mother feels more secure buying an app online than walking to the newsstand down the road. And that, my friends, is the reason why I believe app stores will succeed.

The ability to pay for your digital content in ONE place, all in one click of a button is magic. Until the web can fix compatibility problem, offline reading, payment options, reminders, push notifications and much more, mobile applications will rule.

I’m not a big sport fan. Actually thinking about it, I’m no fan at all. My circle of interest is limited to family, faith, technology and very little time left for other distractions.

One of my guilty pleasures is watching movies during long flights. Mostly for its soporific agent. Very rarely can my body stay alert until the very end word.

Invictus is one of those movies. A movie transcending actors into players, script into documentary.

Clint Eastwood directed the movie – maybe I should have started with this. Gran Torino is undoubtedly among best movies of the decade.

Short pitch: Morgan Freeman plays is Nelson Mandela. The story focuses on the end of apartheid in South Africa and how rugby helped in reunifying the country together. Mandela had the perception sport could bring blacks and whites into one homogenized group of supporters. He was right; sport is not about race, religion, skin color but about performance.

Captain of South Africa’s rugby team played by Matt Damon comes from a family of white pro-apartheid activists that slowly understood the need to change. The movie gives a short glimpse of what was the process of re-unification after the apartheid. Clint Eastwood left the violence aside to focus on 1995 victory of South Africa during World Rugby Cup.

France had its Mandela moment after they won 1998 World Football Cup. I remember that night on Champs-Elysées when people were kissing, hugging and cheering all together. La France Black-Blanc-Beur literally Black, White and Arab was born.

My first visit to Johannesburg was in 1982 as a kid, it was a disturbing experience. I was horrified. Years later I came back in 1990 and things seemed even worse. Hopefully my last trip there in 2001 was a much different experience although poverty and discrimination are still dominant.

Movie has been out for a while. A must-see.

“I’m the master of my fate, I’m the captain of my soul” says Mandela. Food for thoughts.

Half of my feeds is about Facebook and their privacy policy. A complete case of propaganda built up by the blogo-journalistic cartel. Few thousands of top self proclaimed internet right activists are trying to convince 300 Million users that their life is ‘exposed’ by Facebook voluntary exploitation of public data.

Facebook offers a wide selection of options to protect your info and we will go through those steps a bit later. But let’s not be hypocrite here, if you want to keep your life private you need to stay away from social networks. Permanently.

Those attacks are becoming more targeted against Mark Zuckerberg like an attempt to stop the ascension of a giant. The worst is to come after I read the upcoming release of a movie describing Facebook’s founder as a drunk billionaire geek who is a sex-mad “borderline-autistic” conniver.

Mike Arrington wrote an excellent note on the subject but personally I think Zuck will have to face the same hatred Jobs and Gates faced decades ago. Hopefully genius will prevail.

—

Now here is how you can simply protect some level of privacy on Facebook.

Simply login to your account and head to ‘Privacy Settings’

Once you get there click on ‘Personal Information and Posts’

This will give you access to a set of customizable features. For best protection chose ’only friends’ to all options.

I personally do not accept wall posts. If a friend has something to say he can:

-       send me a message or – comment one of my entries.

Finally you can opt-out from public searches meaning search engines will not display your Facebook profile

One last recommendation – be sure to set privacy settings on applications and games. You surely don’t want to share your recent activity across the board:

Be curious and explore those pages. You will find lots of useful information.

The only valid reproach we can aim at Facebook is the lack of universal control of privacy [windows way for security] where user can set level of data sharing from None to Public in one click.

In french we have a nice expression “l’arbre qui cache la foret” literal translation ‘”the tree that hides the forest’. Icelandic volcano is a big tree planted right in front our eyes to hide a much larger problem: airlines gigantic losses.

Earlier today Air France made an announcement claiming a 35M Euro loss per day due to the ash cloud. Share lost 5% on french sotck market – enough to call for a bail out by European Commission.

Bunch of crap. Of course there was an eruption, and safety should prevail. Extreme weather conditions is a cause of force majeure and does not oblige airlines to reimburse any of their customers. Their only obligation is to re-schedule flights. So when they say losses- they mean loss of income. Quite different.

But here is the biggest issue. Air France will shortly publish their figures for 2009 and guess what? A 1.3 billion Euro loss roughly $1.8 billions. Yes a mere $5M burned each day…ashes to ashes.

Volcano is to airlines what the mad cow disease was to meat producers. A savior.

Air France is poorly managed and like in the 70′s, 80′s and 90′s they seek for Government monies. How convenient.

Public bail out means us – tax payers. Expect to see a ‘volcano tax’ very soon on EU airfare. After all they have it all figured out – 20 euros per ticket and they break-even.

Bummer!

It all started with a blog post by Fred Wilson about 3^rd party apps temporarily filling holes for Twitter followed by a series of announcement that sparked the Twitt-o-sphere on fire. The young growing social network officially released their first mobile application for Blackberry and announced the acquisition of Tweetie (leading iPhone client).

What does it mean for other 3^rd party applications offering competing products on BlackBerry and iPhone? Well it doesn’t look too good to be honest- terrible news for Socialscope, Ubertwitter and Seesmic who devoted thousand of hours building a Twitter client for Blackberry and ultimately hoped to be acquired by Twitter…

The official application uses non-public APIs, offers no request limitation (recently Twitter raised their limitation to 150 requests per hour) and can be easily promoted virally by Twitter as a featured application. So many reasons for developers to spoof a revolt and to call for a broken Twitter eco-system…I call it bullsh*t.

Because frankly – this is what they were all looking for. To beat the watch and build a good enough client so Twitter will buy them out. It didn’t happen although Twitter had initiated contact with those companies. Obviously the price range to acquire a Blackberry client didn’t make any sense to Twitter’s investors (Fred Wilson at least) so they decided to go build their own. If one of the apps had been bought out – the feedback would have been very different.

When I hear stories about Twitter eco-system it reminds me of a quote from Louis C.K. “it’s funny how quickly the world owes him something he knew existed only ten seconds ago”.

About 15 months ago I wrote this post discussing about Twitter’s options to drive revenue. The main threat to revenue stream was obviously the existence of 3^rd party applications making money on the back of the social network. Not many developers were too concerned about it and kept raising money to bite the hand that feeds them.

This is why Ev Williams promptly announced the acquisition of Tweetie, confusing everyone on Twitter’s real intentions for future growth. Will they buy or will they develop?

In the meantime, many Twitter clients will disappear from the radar until developers can focus on producing genuine ideas and not just filling holes.

Here are my thoughts after 5 days of regular usage of an iPad.

• The device has an autonomy of >10 hours which is really amazing considering it’s running on Wifi most of the time.
• iPad’s screen quickly becomes covered with finger prints obscuring the image. I’ll be waiting for a screen protector like this one.
• Wifi is flaky. Not sure if it’s a hardware problem but shutting wifi off and then back on again solves the problem on my unit. Hoping for a firmware update to solve it permanently.
• Lack of a native clock application is unacceptable. Apple has it on the iphone and ipod. It’s the #2 feature of any computing device. How did they miss it?
• No native calculator is also a big fail in my opinion. Why should I pay $4 for a basic 30ko application that should be built-in?
• Apostrophe key is not present on main keyboard. You need to go one layer down. Very annoying. Hopefully another bug easily fixable via a firmware update. For the apostrophe shortcut, just hold the coma via @madamelolo
• I didn’t know the iPad had a microphone. Nice tip from Andy Abramson. Works great when using Skype (BTW Skype app is not yet iPad friendly).
• Seamless video playback. I watched 2 movies so far with great brightness, perfect picture, almost no pixelization.
• Picture frame feature will make any hotel room look like home. Simply launch it from the lock screen (not obvious at first) and enjoy your family pictures full-screen with a bunch of possible slideshow effects.
• Unless I missed something, Safari can’t remember your passwords. Don’t feel like buying 1password application to fill the blank. Will wait for an update. Go to setting–>safari–>autofill to save login/password via @madamelolo
• Keyboard is pleasant, efficient and precise despite what some tech journos wrote. I type most of my emails on the tablet and I find it extremely accurate.

Most people I met that haven’t bought one yet are saying to be waiting for a newer version. Although a newer version is always coming there is supposedly somewhere between 400.000 to 700.000 units sold so far. If I was into hardware I would build a line of accessories based on this iPad case with integrated webcam, solar panel, or extra-battery. The iPad case is the perfect extension to add functionality to an already powerful device.

Last point after a few days showing off the tablet around is the sociability of the object. Andy also mentioned it to me. As soon as I pull it out my backpack, it brings immediate attention from strangers asking millions of questions. Becomes annoying after a while to be honest.