Apple vs. Adobe vs. Content Creators

Lack of Flash support on the iPad could undermine publisher's tablet ideas

by Mac Slocum | @macslocum | comments: 17

Remember when Wired's fancy tablet demo made the rounds a few months ago? That Adobe Air-driven prototype certainly stoked the fires of iPad enthusiasm.

There's just one problem: It won't work on the iPad. It won't work natively on the iPad.

Leander Kahney at Cult of Mac explains why:

Apple has rejected Adobe technologies like Flash and Air — with extreme prejudice. No one at Condé Nast appears to have seen that coming, even though the iPhone OS hasn’t supported Flash since its launch in 2007.

Maybe Condé Nast developers thought the iPad would run Mac OS. Or maybe they just got ahead of themselves.

Update 2/5: Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson notes in the comments, and in a follow-up piece at Cult of Mac, that the iPad's Flash limitations were known from the start. Wired will be available on the iPad, as well as Android and Windows.

Time Inc. ran into a similar problem just before the iPad's launch. Its Sports Illustrated tablet prototype was constructed around a wish list, not tech specs.

This is the first sign I've seen that the Apple vs. Adobe spat is spilling beyond the tech space. Content creators accustomed to the Adobe toolset -- particularly Air and Flash -- will have to recalibrate if they want to be on the iPad (and really, who doesn't want to be on that thing?). That means more development and a longer wait for consumers.

The iPad and publishers: A survey of early reaction

by Mac Slocum | @macslocum | comments: 30

What really jumped out to me as I looked over the iPad's feature set is that the device is clearly built for media consumption. Movies, music, books, news -- the bread and butter content that keeps iTunes humming. That's good for Apple, obviously, but it also creates an interesting opportunity for publishers. They've got a new distribution mechanism and a new canvas.

With that in mind, I decided to filter the barrage of iPad coverage through a publishing lens. What follows are intriguing ideas culled from all sorts of sources. Most revolve around content applications the iPad may provide.

There's no way I'll catch all the good stuff -- there's just too much out there -- so please use the comments area to post links and commentary that grab your attention, publishing-related and otherwise.

Ebook pricing could get interesting

The iPad's release portends a price-point battle between Apple and Amazon. That's ebook pricing, not hardware.

The Wall Street Journal says Apple is pushing book publishers to set two ebook price points, $12.99 and $14.99, with Apple taking its customary 30 percent cut from any sales. They key word in all this is "set." The big kahuna of ebooks, Amazon, controls its pricing. Most bestsellers are parked at $9.99, which is below what Amazon pays a publisher for a title. Amazon is subsidizing its low price point.

But that's the present. The future is a different matter. The thought is that Amazon is taking a short-term loss on ebooks so it can solidify its position as the dominant channel. Once it owns the ebook market, Amazon can ditch the subsidy and force publishers to renegotiate pricing.

That's the fear, and Apple appears to be playing to it by giving publishers an option: get a measure of pricing control through Apple, or make more with Amazon but pray they don't rewrite the rules later. (Apple could always rewrite rules, too ...)

Update 1/31: Macmillan fired the first shot across Amazon's bow, which led to Amazon pulling Macmillan titles. Amazon has since backed down and reluctantly agreed to Macmillan's terms. The Wall Street Journal puts the disagreement in context:

It is expected that publishers will now seek to do business with Amazon and other e-book retailers on the same terms as with Apple. By setting their own prices, publishers would be able to eliminate discounting on Amazon and elsewhere that they believe threatens the long-term business model of publishing.

What's really interesting about this -- and kind of bizarre -- is that the binary Apple-or-Amazon thinking obscures an important point: mobile devices already offer publishers plenty of pricing options.

What about e-reader applications?

Steve Jobs famously quipped a couple of years ago that "people don't read anymore." Well, I guess Apple changed its stance on that one. The new iBooks app -- and accompanying store -- is a big ol' cannonball in the ebook pool.

Early discussion on a back-channel publishing list I follow has focused on how Apple will treat its new ebook competitors. Will established applications, like Stanza and the Kindle app, be removed? Kirk Biglione, co-founder of Medialoper, thinks competitors will remain in Apple's universe. Just don't count on sharing titles across apps:

Look for books to be added as a new media type in the device media library. The other reading apps may be able to co-exist as long as they don't access books stored in that library. So, for example, you probably won't be able to use Stanza to read iBooks. [Note: Kirk gave me permission to post his comments.]

One thing to consider here: Past inquiries from the Federal Communications Commission may soften Apple's competitive instincts. At least for a while.

Of course, FCC heat doesn't preclude Apple from a little friendly rivalry. Digital Trends picked up on the backhanded compliment Jobs gave Amazon during the iPad presentation:

... [Jobs] basically told the online retailer that we’ll take it from here.

The reading/viewing experience

Apple has already shown what it's capable of on the music and video front, so I'm curious to see how it handles the book experience. Early word is positive from folks who tested the iPad. Here's Gizmodo's take:

It's an optical illusion, but just seeing the depth of pages makes the iBook app feel more like a book than a Kindle ever did for me. The text is sharp, and while the screen is bright, it doesn't seem to strains the eyes—but time will tell on that.

Speaking of the Kindle ...

David Pogue, New York Times tech columnist and Missing Manual author, noted that the iPad is more responsive than Amazon's e-reader. Technologically, that's comparing apples to oranges since the devices have different architectures. But it's relevant if you're judging e-reader functionality. In a broader-view piece, John Gruber said speed is the iPad's defining characteristic. You can get a sense of the iPad's response rate in this TechCrunch video.

The iPad is backwards compatible with existing iPhone applications. That's useful if you've invested in buying apps or creating them. However, Joshua Topolsky of Engadget called out a display issue those "old" apps create:

It's kind of silly looking. A lone app in the center of a black screen.

More to come

I'll be adding to this post in the coming days as more analysis bubbles up. Again, please use the comments to point out interesting or informative links you come across as well.

Four short links: 27 January 2010

Science Publishing, iState of the Union, Synthetic Bio Obstacles, UK Government Cloud

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Why I Am Disappointed with Nature Communications (Cameron Neylon) -- fascinating to learn what you can't do with "non-commercial"-licensed science research: using a paper for commercially funded research even within a university, using the content of paper to support a grant application, using the paper to judge a patent application, using a paper to assess the viability of a business idea.
2. The iState of the Union (Slate) -- humorous take on the State of the Union address, as given by Steve Jobs.
3. Five Obstacles for Synthetic Biology -- a reminder that biology is bloody hard, natural or synthetic. "There are very few molecular operations that you understand in the way that you understand a wrench or a screwdriver or a transistor," says Rob Carlson, a principal at the engineering, consulting and design company Biodesic in Seattle, Washington. And the difficulties multiply as the networks get larger, limiting the ability to design more complex systems. A 2009 review showed that although the number of published synthetic biological circuits has risen over the past few years, the complexity of those circuits — or the number of regulatory parts they use — has begun to flatten out. (via Sciblogs)
4. UK Government to Set Up Own Cloud (Guardian) -- will build a dozen data centres (each costing £250m) and push for open source on central and local government computers, eventually resulting in thin clients and "shared utilities". (via jasonwyran on Twitter)

Four short links: 22 January 2010

notmuch Email, Mobile Processing, Realtime Mocap, and Making Money from Books

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 1

1. notmuch -- commandline tagging and fast search for a mailbox, regardless of which mail client you use.
2. Processing for Android -- pre-release versions of a Processing for Android devices. Mobile visual programming makes for interesting possibilities.
3. Binary Body Double: Microsoft Reveals the Science Behind Project Natal for Xbox 360 -- machine learning to recognize poses and render in the game at 30fps. It's a basic real-time mocap and render.
4. The Monetization Paradox -- interesting post by Charlie Stross about the quandry of authors. he proposed $9.99 cap on ebooks replaces the high-end $24 hardcover. Not only does it mean less royalties for the authors, it means less money for the publishers — or, more importantly, their marketing divisions. Here's a hint: if I wanted to spend my time marketing my books I'd have gone into marketing. I'm a writer. Every hour spent on marketing activities is an hour spent not writing. Ditto editing, proofreading, commissioning cover art, and so on. This is what I have publishers for.

Bringing e-Books to Africa and the Middle East

Infrastructure, economics and censorship are major issues

by James Turner | comments: 1

In the United States, Western Europe and Asia, e-Books are becoming a major player, especially now that e-Readers like the Kindle and Nook are available. But people living in the Arabic-speaking world or Africa haven't been invited to the dance. Two of the keynote speakers at the upcoming Tools of Change conference are working to improve access to e-Books in these areas: Arthur Attwell in South Africa and Ramy Habeeb in Egypt. We talked to each of them about how e-Books are important in their area of the world, and the challenges that they are facing.

Arthur Attwell runs Electric Book Works, based out of Cape Town. His company does both traditional print publication and electronic publication, but he believes that e-Books have a particular promise in South Africa. "Certainly in South Africa, our traditional model doesn't even begin to reach the market that I think digital publishing could cater for. For me, digital is a massive social development tool. I like to think of e-books as one small application of digital publishing, which is really a grand process of putting the world of letters onto the internet.

"Mobile is one of the keys to that, I think, for Africa because of the existing penetration of mobile devices, but there may be other ways of harnessing digital as well that will include distributing e-books through libraries and internet cafes, kiosks, any infrastructure that doesn't require someone to be spending a lot of money on a device. I think print on-demand has got a massive future for Africa, and developing countries in general, because of the way it caters to people with low cash flow and who just need a book right now; they can't afford to get an e-reader or even a netbook computer to read books in the long-term."

"I think that we will see an incredible growth of digital publishing in Africa over the next few years, we're in the process right now of really just laying down the infrastructure that's going to make that possible. Mobile has done a lot, but because mobile tends to be controlled by network operators, it doesn't have quite the freedom of the internet. So I don't think it's necessarily going to see the same innovation at a very high centralized level. But I do think that with the massive growth of bandwidth and connectivity we're seeing right now, especially in Central Africa, that more conventional web-based applications of content and content-sharing will take off there as well."

While mobile access to e-Books in Africa is largely an urban phenomenon right now, Attwell thinks that is changing. "You're probably going to find that 80 percent of internet connections in any African country will always be in the urban centers. So that's naturally then where the investment money's going to be going. But we're already seeing some exciting innovative approaches to getting internet connectivity into more rural areas. I know that in South Africa, we have fairly common solution where farmers in a particular area will get together and pool their resources to share a satellite internet connection or something similar, often even solar-powered connections. Naturally, rural is an area where mobile will be critical."

"I think one of the really exciting trend-setting technologies at the moment is the success of the M-Pesa mobile payment system in Kenya. I think that that system is showing the power of a simple effective mobile application, there obviously for the purpose of transferring money between people. But it's an incredibly powerful tool in Kenya and used as much in rural areas as it is in urban."

(continue reading)

Four short links: 15 January 2010

Best Science Blogging, Nat Friedman, State of the World, MTA Data

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. The Open Laboratory -- collection of the best science writing on blogs from the last year. For more, see an interview with the author. Part of a growing trend where online comes first and feeds offline. (via sciblogs)
2. Nat Friedman Leaving Novell -- one of the original Ximian founders, with interests in many directions and the coding chops to make them real. He'll found another startup, topic as yet unknown, which will be one to watch.
3. Bruce Sterling's State of the World 2010 -- sometimes funny, often thought-provoking, always interesting. Americans really want and need and desire a Futuristic Vision Thing, they get all lonesome and moody without one, but it's absolutely gotta be one of those good-old-fashioned American Futuristic Vision Things, just like the Americans had in the 1950s when everybody else was still on fire from total war and cleaning up the death camps.
4. MTA Releases Data -- NYC finally releases transit data, free for developers to reuse. (via timoreilly on Twitter)

Four short links: 14 January 2010

Google for Good, Flash in JS, Pop Software, and Scientific Publishing

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 0

1. Four Possible Explanations for Google's Big China Move (Ethan Zuckerman) -- I'm staying out of the public commentary on this one, but Ethan's fourth point was wonderfully thought provoking: a Google-backed anticensorship system (perhaps operated in conjunction with some of the smart activists and engineers who’ve targeted censorship in Iran and China?) would be massively more powerful (and threatening!) than the systems we know about today. It's deliciously provocative to ask what the world's strongest tech company could do if it wanted to be actively good, rather than merely "not evil".
2. Gordon -- An open source Flash™ runtime written in pure JavaScript. (via Hacker News)
3. Pop Software -- great blog post about this new category of software. The people who are consuming software now are a vast superset of the people who used to do so. At one time, especially on the Mac, we’d see people chose software based upon how well it suited their requirements to get a job done. This new generation of software consumers isn’t like that - they’re less likely to shop around for something rather they shop around for anything. These are people who want to be entertained as much as they want to have their requirements met. [...] Apps are not Applications - they are their own things. They are smaller. They are more fun. Pop software has amazing scale, is hit-driven, is a very hard business for developers, and isn't going away. (via timo on Delicious)
4. Why Hasn't Scientific Publishing Been Disrupted? -- an analysis of the scientific publishing world: what roles it serves, how some of those roles can be better served by new technology, and which roles are still mired in traditions and performance plans anchored to the old models. As is often the case, people won't move to the new system when the amount they're paid is determined by the old system. (via timoreilly on Twitter)

Android Rising: O'Reilly Android Apps Gaining Ground on iPhone

by Andrew Savikas | @andrewsavikas | comments: 21

O'Reilly sells apps in both the iPhone App Store and the Android Market. Most apps (for now) are just app presentations of our ebooks, built using ereader apps popular on each platform (Stanza on iPhone, Aldiko on Android).

That means many of our apps are essentially the same on each platform, so any difference in sales can be at somewhat correlated to the relative market share of each device/market. It should be no surprise that we sell more apps on the iPhone than in the Android market.

But what was surprising about a recent look at the data was just how quickly the Android sales are growing relative to iPhone. The last time I checked about two months ago, Android apps were tracking at about 10% of iPhone sales for the same title. But a look at the past two weeks of sales across 200 apps available on both platforms shows a striking uptick in Android share, to 22%:

I was an early skeptic of Android, clouded by how much I love my iPhone. But I've since come around, and though I still believe iPhone will retain its top spot among smartphones, the market and platform from all of those Android devices put together will be a very big story in 2010 (especially if Google makes some sorely needed improvements to the Market -- a 30-character limit on app titles? Really? And how about a non-Android Web view of the market -- Google of all companies should know the importance of linking).

Four short links: 20 October 2009

Politics in The Age of Social Software, Ethernet Patents, Free Book Fear, Programming Exercises

by Nat Torkington | @gnat | comments: 7

1. Poles, Politeness, and Politics in the Age of Twitter (Stephen Fry) -- begins with a discussion of a UK storm but rapidly turns into a discussion of fame in the age of Twitter, modern political discourse, the "deadwood press", and The Commons in Twitter Assembled. There is an energy abroad in the kingdom, one that yearns for a new openness in our rule making, our justice system and our administration. Do not imagine for a minute that I am saying Twitter is it. Its very name is the clue to its foundation and meaning. It is not, as I have pointed out before, called Ponder or Debate. It is called Twitter. But there again some of the most influential publications of the eighteenth century had titles like Tatler, Rambler, Idler and Spectator. Hardly suggestive of earnest political intent either. History has a habit of choosing the least prepossessing vessels to be agents of change.
2. Apple and Others Hit With Lawsuit Over 90s Ethernet Patents -- unclear whether the plaintiff is 3Com (who filed the patents) or a troll who bought them. "We strongly believe that 3Com’s Ethernet technologies are being regularly infringed by foreign and some US companies," said David A. Kennedy, Chief Executive Officer of U.S. Ethernet Innovations. "We believe that the continued aggressive enforcement of the fundamental Ethernet technologies developed by 3Com against the waves of cheap, knock-off, foreign manufactured equipment is a necessary step in protecting the competitiveness of this American technology and American companies in general." (via Slashdot)
3. The Point -- someone's publishing Mark Pilgrim's "Dive into Python", which was published by APress under an open content license. Naturally this freaked out APress (it's easy to imagine many eyelids would tic nervously should such a thing happen with one of O'Reilly's open-licensed books). Mark's response is fantastic. Part of choosing a Free license for your own work is accepting that people may use it in ways you disapprove of. There are no “field of use” restrictions, and there are no “commercial use” restrictions either. In fact, those are two of the fundamental tenets of the “Free” in Free Software. If “others profiting from my work” is something you seek to avoid, then Free Software is not for you. Opt for a Creative Commons “Non-Commercial” license, or a “personal use only” freeware license, or a traditional End User License Agreement. Free Software doesn’t have “end users.” That’s kind of the point.
4. Programming Praxis -- programming exercises to keep your skills razor-sharp, with solutions.

Microsoft Press Enters Strategic Alliance with O'Reilly

by Tim O'Reilly | @timoreilly | comments: 34

Today, Microsoft and O'Reilly Media announced an agreement to support and expand Microsoft Press. Under the terms of the strategic alliance, O'Reilly will be the exclusive distributor of Microsoft Press titles and co-publisher of all Microsoft Press titles, on Nov. 30, 2009. We'll be working with Microsoft to develop new books, as well as distributing both existing and new co-published books to bookstores, and, perhaps most importantly, to the emerging digital book channels that represent the future of book publishing. Microsoft could have chosen to partner with any of the major computer book publishers. That they chose to work with us is a testament to three advantages we bring to the business:

1. O'Reilly is more than a book publisher. We are an advocate, a connector, and a community builder. We help developers and users make the most of technology, with a focus on what they need to know. Microsoft has a history of building great developer communities, but in today's world, those communities need to be connected with other communities outside Microsoft. Especially in technology, "the world is flat."
2. O'Reilly plays a unique role in the technology ecosystem: from our earliest days, we provided the documentation for important technologies for which there was no "vendor." The internet, the World Wide Web, Linux and other open source software, and Web 2.0 all were documented and given mainstream awareness by O'Reilly books and events. We identify and evangelize the disruptive technologies that reinvigorate the industry.
3. O'Reilly has been a pioneer in the new world of ebooks. In the early 1990s, we co-developed docbook, one of the first standardized formats for ebooks, and the progenitor of future XML-based ebook formats. In 2001, in partnership with the Pearson Technology Group, we launched Safari Books Online, the largest and most comprehensive electronic subscription library of computer books and videos. We've built a successful direct business with DRM-free downloads of ebook bundles that work on any device. We're an early leader in publishing books for the iPhone and other portable reading devices, and understanding how to use ebook channels to reach new customers. And of course, our Tools of Change for Publishing Conference (TOC) has become the place to share knowledge about the changes sweeping through publishing.

On this last point, I'm particularly excited that as part of this agreement, Microsoft has committed to make its ebooks DRM-free and device-independent. One of our goals at O'Reilly has been to make sure that ebook customers can read them on any device, and have the ability to keep using them even if they change their preferred device. Having Microsoft Press join us in this commitment is a big step forward towards an open ebook market.

Worldwide Lexicon: matching up technologies and culture to end the language barrier

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 5

I've reported before on the Worldwide Lexicon, the brainchild of my friend Brian McConnell. His most recent breakthrough, which I blogged about in August, was an impressive Firefox plugin that exploits both human and machine translations on the Web to provide pages you can read in your primary language.

As attractive as the Firefox plug-in can be, it's only the first stage in four that Brian plans toward a computing environment that encourages and leverages human translation. On the browser side, the next logical project is to reproduce the Firefox experience for IE users. Ultimately, he hopes the functionality becomes a standard part of every browser. Even better, he's working on a way to include the functionality on the server side so that it's browser-independent (although that technology would require support in the server software, of course).

And there's even more to come. He lays out his vision in an essay boldly titled The End Of The Language Barrier. The bottom of the article points to an equally important statement written for the World Economic Forum by Ethan Zuckerman, founder of the Global Voices site that extends the reach of weblogs to people in many countries who previously lacked access to such forums.

(continue reading)

World Wide Lexicon Toolbar changes the reading experience for the other 99% of web pages

by Andy Oram | @praxagora | comments: 8

Brian McConnell's latest coding effort, World Wide Lexicon Toolbar, meets my criterion for a piece of critical infrastructure: after two days with it I can't get along without it, and I plan to avoid any browser that doesn't have it installed.

Brian is a highly adaptive programmer. With roots in the telecom industry and several start-ups on his resume, he also wrote Beyond Contact: A Guide to SETI and Communicating with Alien Civilizations for O'Reilly. The World Wide Lexicon project he's been working on for the past several years is again something totally different.

Install the add-on (currently experimental) in Firefox 3.5 or higher and visit a page in some language other than your default. Before your eyes, headings and text change into your native language. You can get similar effects by submitting the page to a popular translator such as Google (which is one of the tools used behind the scenes by the WWL toolbar), but the instantaneous effect of the toolbar makes you feel closer to the people whose sites you visit around the world.

There are several languages that I know well enough to get the gist of a page, but where I miss some of the details and get frustrated by gaps in my vocabulary. Therefore, I set the WWL toolbar to "Bilingual view," so each block element of the original text is shown together with its translation. The bilingual view is considerably less attractive, because it swells the size of each block element, but I can tell already that it will improve my language skills quickly.

WWL is designed for volunteer translations. If it becomes more popular, people will submit translations that are much more accurate than the machine-generated ones the WWL must fall back on currently.

What's the process behind this new dimension to web browsing? McConnell let me in on some of the magic.

Volunteer translations

McConnell invented WWL several years ago with the core notion of encouraging people to translate web pages they thought should get a wider audience. When he first told me about the idea, I was skeptical that he would get many volunteers. But then I heard of other volunteer translation efforts. For instance, there's a whole subculture of people who write subtitles for popular Hollywood films. This runs afoul of copyright law, of course (and so do the copies of movies they're attached to, probably) but they show the lengths to which crowdsourcing has progressed in the translation area.

FLOSS Manuals, a project I do volunteer work for, also finds dozens of people willing to translate its open source documentation.

McConnell's first set of tools were designed to facilitate on-the-fly translations. Web designers could enhance their web sites by downloading from the WWL site some JavaScript that made each text element on the page editable. (I blogged about this in December 2007.) The paste-in displayed a little pencil icon, signaling to viewers that they could do instant translations. All they would have to do was click on an element, and a text box would pop up where they could enter their translation. The web site would then register the translation with the central WWL site.

World Wide Lexicon API

The WWL API covers the entire life cycle of a translation: registering a translation, rating translations for quality, searching for a translation of a particular page into a particular language, and retrieving a translation. Queries can specify a minimum rating.

Toolbar

The latest achievement of the WWL project is the toolbar officially released yesterday. It determines the user's native language through settings in the browser. When each page is visited, the toolbar uses the domain name and various tests on the text to make a guess about its language.

The toolbar then issues an API query to see whether any human translations exist. If so, it displays the translations with a light yellow or green background.

If no one has made a human translation (which is usually the case so far) the toolbar resorts to well-known machine translation services. It can make use of Google Translate, Apertium, and Moses, each of which offers an API, and will also query Babelfish when its API is ready. Machine translations are displayed with a light blue or grey background.

The progressive translation used by the toolbar is also interesting. It starts with the first 10 or 20 elements, then translates heading tags (<H1>, etc.), then the larger texts, and ultimately every element on a page. (I displayed one page that embedded a Google ad, and the translator recognized and translated that text too.) McConnell is working on making the various translations run in parallel. Because translation changes the sizes of elements, the toolbar makes various accommodations to display the page as attractively as it can.

In short, WWL is a cool combination of mash-ups, existing services, crowdsourcing, and Ajax. I'm sure that in a year's time I'll think back to its appearance today and be shocked at how primitive it was. But it will remain a transformative tool for me.

Recent Posts

• Four Short Links: 25 August 2009 | by Nat Torkington on August 25, 2009
• Four short links: 14 August 2009 | by Nat Torkington on August 14, 2009
• Four short links: 10 August 2009 | by Nat Torkington on August 10, 2009
• Four short links: 4 August 2009 | by Nat Torkington on August 4, 2009
• Four short links: 3 August 2009 | by Nat Torkington on August 3, 2009
• Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World | by Mark Drapeau on July 15, 2009
• Four short links: 1 July 2009 | by Nat Torkington on July 1, 2009
• My 140conf Talk: Twitter as Publishing | by Tim O'Reilly on June 24, 2009
• Scribd Store a Welcome Addition to Ebook Market (and 650 O'Reilly Titles Included) | by Andrew Savikas on May 17, 2009
• Four short links: 15 May 2009 | by Nat Torkington on May 15, 2009
• Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement | by Pamela Samuelson on April 17, 2009
• What Publishers Need to Learn from Software Developers | by Tim O'Reilly on March 31, 2009