Adobe made a couple of interesting announcements today.
Adobe made a couple of interesting announcements today.
October 05, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (6)
One of Seattle start-ups, iLike, was acquired by MySpace for $20.5 million ($13.5 to buy the company, and $6 million to retain talents). While I am glad to see an exit for Hadi (we used to work together in Microsoft building Internet Explorer), this price tag bothers me a lot (I run Big Canvas Inc., which offers "Big Canvas PhotoShare" - a real-time photo sharing social networking service application to iPhone users).
August 20, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
August 14, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
As one of iPhone developers, I've enjoyed reading about the issue with Flash for iPhone (see "Adobe CEO: Flash on iPhone not easy"). Flash lite is a joke (not compatible with Flash on the web today), but the latest Flash is too big and too heavy for iPhone.
March 05, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
I have started Big Canvas in April 2008. Because this is my second start-up, I have decided to apply everything I've learned from various mistakes I made in the first start-up.
March 04, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (1)
A couple of recent articles about China Mobile got my attention.
But they had now failed to agree on the launch of Apple’s App Store in China, something that the cellco sees as a threat to its own place in teh value chain. "Wang said China Mobile should operate the application store itself in order to maintain its advantage," the source at CMRI said.
However, the Google platform scored many other points, notably gaining increased endorsement from China Mobile, the world’s largest mobile operator by subscribers, which announced plans to adopt a more open business model.
While I understand why China Mobile wants to control the application store (they don't want to become a dumb pipe), this business model is too expensive for third party developers to distribute their applications world-wide.
February 17, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Many people ask me why I am so excited about iPhone, and why I am working so hard. The answer is very simple. This is one of rare opportunities for software engineers (like me) to participate -- a really big opportunity to change the lifestyle of millions of people (if not billions). Let me explain what this "opportunity" mean to me, using similar experiences I had in the past. First opportunity: Windows 95 This opportunity came to me in the middle of '89. I was looking for a position in Microsoft Redmond (I was in Tokyo office at that time, and was making a request to transfer myself to Redmond), and Bill Gates suggested me a couple of positions. One of them was a position in "object-oriented shell" team, whose mission was to create the "user interface of next generation of operating system", and there is no question to me that I "have to" take this opportunity. It was still in the very early stage of GUI-OS era (Microsoft was working on Windows 3.0, and OS/2 project was still alive), and Apple was a clear leader but Microsoft was in very good position because of the success of MS-DOS and the partnership with IBM. It was very clear to me that this is one of rare opportunities to participate in this kind of big innovation. The actual development was not smooth at all because of various internal and external issues (unexpected success of Windows 3.1, break-up with IBM, politic between Cairo and Chicago projects), but I have managed to hang on to this opportunity and was able to participate the development of Windows 95. It took five and half years to achieve this, but the reward was huge. The release date of Windows 95 was clearly one of the most exciting days of my life. Second opportunity: Internet Explorer 3.0 Right after Windows 95, the opportunity to participate in the "Internet evolution" came to me. While other engineers in the Windows group were either taking vacations or working on incremental feature for Windows, I became very passionate about the Internet. I was inspired by a couple of white papers written by Marc Andreessen, CEO of Netscape - despite I was in Microsoft. It became so clear to me that Internet will change the lifestyle of millions of people, and turn the operating system into a commodity. I immediately lost an interest on working on Windows, and determined to participate in this Internet innovation. First, I created a peer-to-peer web server for Windows desktop machine (so that every desktop machine in the world become a web server), but this project was killed because of politics. So I injected myself into the Internet Explorer team (even though my official position was still in Windows), and started rewriting its user interface (everything but HTML rendering engine) from scratch. The result was IE3.0 and 4.0, and Windows 98 (which integrated IE into Windows Explorer). Third opportunity: iPhone, PhotoShare and PhotoCanvas From my point of view, iPhone represents one of rare opportunities very much like those two opportunities described above. It is so clear to me that this is the beginning of real "mobile computing", and I "have to" be a part of this innovation. I don't know how long does it take, but I am so sure that mobile phones will eventually become the primary communication device for hundreds of millions of people. The communication medium will shift from just voice calls and text messages to something much richer, including pictures or video taken by built-in camera. This is exactly why I built PhotoShare for iPhone and keep improving it based on feedback from those early adaptors. Even many creative activities, such as writing and image editing, will shift to mobile phones. I am so sure that the number of mobile users who edit photos on their mobile phones will eventually exceed the number of PhotoShop users. This is why I am working on PhotoCanvas, photo/image editing software for iPhone. It is impossible to match all the feature set of PhotoShop at this moment because of various limitations, but it does not stop me to focus on key user scenarios and build an application specifically designed for such scenarios. When I see this kind of opportunity, I really want to participate it. I have a very strong desire to become one of key contributers of such a life-style-changing event. This makes me a software engineer. This makes me an entrepreneur.
January 29, 2009 | Permalink | Comments (2)
I know that this is a very difficult question, but one thing is so clear. If they want to see developers like us building a lot of applications (like Apple iPhone), they have to (see Nancy Gohring's article on PCWorld, which has several quotes by my).
December 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
We have released our forth iPhone application, OilCanvas, last week. It was accepted very well in Asian market initially (we quickly became the most popular application in Japanese app store). The take-off in U.S. market is slower, but we see a solid growth.
December 01, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Big Canvas has released its third iPhone application, PhotoArtist last weekend. PhotoArtist is a simple photo processing application, which converts a regular photo into a various form of artwork, such as illustration and water color.
Because of its connection to the PhotoShare, a real-time photo sharing service for iPhone, those users who purchased PhotoArtist immediately started sharing their artworks (within a few minutes after it became available on the app store), which is a very unique phenominon we've never seen before.
As the result, we were able to see hundres of artworks generated by PhotoArtist users over this weekend. Here are some examples.
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November 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)