John Paczkowski

Recent Posts by John Paczkowski

Beatles, Apps More Popular Than Jesus

iphone-appsstoreThe mobile application market is clearly a large and growing one, but will it someday be “as big as the Internet”? According to independent app store GetJar, it will.

In an interview with BBC News, GetJar CEO Ilja Laurs said the next decade will see such massive growth in the market that apps will rival the Web in popularity. “Apps will be as big if not bigger than the Internet,” GetJar predicted.

“They will peak at around 100,000 by the end of the year. That will be a tipping point and after that there will be a gradual fall in the rate of development. The full blossom will come in ten years and mobile apps will become as popular as Web sites are today with consumers.”

A grandiose claim, to be sure, but one that strains believability a bit less than it might, now that Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes App Store has racked up 1.5 billion downloads. That said, what, exactly, does “as big as the Internet” mean? And won’t the progression toward that metric be undermined once smart phones fully support HTML5, Flash and whatnot?

Why bother developing apps for multiple platforms–iPhone OS, webOS, Android, Symbian–when one could simply develop a single Web app that will serve all of them at once?

As Google Engineering vice president Vic Gundotra recently said, the browser is where things are headed. “What we clearly see happening is a move to incredibly powerful browsers,” he said. “Many, many applications can be delivered through the browser and what that does for our costs is stunning. We believe the web has won and over the next several years, the browser, for economic reasons almost, will become the platform that matters and certainly that’s where Google is investing.”

Twitter’s Tanking

December 30, 2013 at 6:49 am PT

2013 Was a Good Year for Chromebooks

December 29, 2013 at 2:12 pm PT

BlackBerry Pulls Latest Twitter for BB10 Update

December 29, 2013 at 5:58 am PT

Apple CEO Tim Cook Made $4.25 Million This Year

December 28, 2013 at 12:05 pm PT

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The problem with the Billionaire Savior phase of the newspaper collapse has always been that billionaires don’t tend to like the kind of authority-questioning journalism that upsets the status quo.

— Ryan Chittum, writing in the Columbia Journalism Review about the promise of Pierre Omidyar’s new media venture with Glenn Greenwald