Back in May, when Steve Jobs was still the CEO of Apple, I opined that the best thing Steve Jobs created was not the Macintosh, iPod, iPhone or the iPad, but Apple itself, the insanely great technology company.

Steve Jobs

There have been many great tributes to SJ, but I particularly liked with one by Jeff Bezos. He said something to the effect of: “Steve created three companies in his lifetime, the first Apple before he was ousted, Pixar and the Apple he resurrected when he came back to an almost bankrupt company”. When you think deep about it, you find how profound an impact SJ in fact had. He helped launch the PC industry, helped create one of the most profitable film genre of recent years (computer generated animated films), changed the music industry, changed the telecommunications industry and was leading us into the post-PC industry. If this is not super-human, I don’t know what is. All the while he made it look easy. Which is a true mark of a magician.

The remarkable thing here is that it takes a different kind of persons to create a startup, then turn it into a well-oiled functioning profitable machine and eventually run a public company. SJ did this 3x over and ended up creating the most successful technology company the world has ever seen.

Think of it this way, the impact SJ had in his 35 years career almost equals the impact Alexander Graham Bell, Walt Disney and Jack Welch (also created the biggest publicly traded company during his tenure) have had spanning multiple lifetimes and careers.

Can’t wait for Walter Isaacson’s official Steve Jobs biography.

“We are committed to demonstrating unquestionable dynamic metamorphosis by quality products and improved returns from the top down.”

“Our value proposition is to recontextualize modular capabilities to capture market share while exceeding expectations”

OK, those are not our vision or mission statements. In fact, those are generated by a computer (on a side note, the Dilbert mission statement generator is gone with the new redesigned site). There is even an app for that: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mission-statement-generator/id319708231?mt=8. But I can totally imagine some large corporate paying top dollars for a mission statement like that.

Every so often I am asked about our vision or mission. Growing up in India, one thing we were told from childhood was to not chase fame or fortune. Just add value and the success will follow. How does this tie into a vision statement? Does a company even need a vision statement? I think it’s Guy Kawasaki who suggests having a mantra. And things like Apple’s “Think Different” or Google’s “Don’t Be Evil” or “We Want To Organize World’s Information And Make It Universally Accessible” qualify as mantra.

So what do we care about at ZENTITY? Do we want to be next Apple/Google/IBM? Are we building a Zynga/ngmoco/Chillingo of Europe or the Czech Republic? No, the answer is rather simple: we are building ZENTITY. Just as Google was not next Yahoo. We are not next anything. And what do we care about at ZENTITY? It all started with a basic idea, way before we even had the name for the company: human potential is a terrible thing to waste. And that’s what we care about. Let every one, every single one become the best they can be. Great results come automagically (and it does seem like magic to some ). We combine that mantra with our belief and focus on mobility, which in our perspective is the most important phenomenon of our times. We put that together and let great people run with their ideas. That’s pretty much it. We have applied this successfully to areas as diverse as Gaming to Media to Financial Services. The common thread being: mobile solutions.

I think it’s Mark Pincus who suggested that everyone in your company should be a CEO of something. That makes total sense. And as Steve Jobs says: “when you’re the janitor, reasons matter. Somewhere between the janitor and the CEO, reasons stop mattering.”

So, there, we have our vision and mission on record.

Even though I love blogging, for one reason or the other I simply can’t find time to keep our blog up to date. A lot has happened since my last blog post. We launched three more apps: Hyundai on Galaxy Tab, DuoFax on Android and REAL-CITY on Blackberry. In fact, calling them apps doesn’t do them much justice. I personally prefer to call them mobile solutions. The apps are created as solution to a need and a lot more than the native client component is involved.

In other tech news, Google+ was launched to great fanfare. I barely realized when I became +Abhishek, and it’s no wonder 20 million users were reached within days. The products packaging is fantastic and Larry Page is already making an impact (as if, PageRank was a small feat ). The sign of great companies is their ability to evolve. It’s pure darwinism. Evolving creatures can’t afford to have innovators dilemma. Eventually, Search will trump pure play Social Networking. The idea of circles not being symmetric is a genius. In one fell swoop, Google has challenged both Twitter and Facebook. For some reason, the most active person on my wall is Sergey Brin and I know all about his trip to Egypt. This would not be possible on Twitter or Facebook. Of course, whether anyone cares is not a question which technology can answer.

Being a passionate iPad user, I never gave Galaxy Tab much of a chance. Finally I got an opportunity to actually try out Galaxy Tab as part of a development project ZENTITY is working on. The project is exciting and probably one of it’s kind in this region, but more on that after the launch

So, the Galaxy Tab. I assumed it will be a copy of the iPad in every form, I was quite surprised that except for the packaging and fact that it’s a full-screen device there is not much of a resemblance. The difference is almost like using an Android phone over an iPhone. The UI is reasonably polished. There are a few glitches, e.g. you don’t expect things like an empty Samsung Apps Store. This will never happen on an Apple device, but hey, give Sammy a chance here, it’s version one.

Rest of it is what you would expect on an Android device. It’s possible to get used to it and be reasonably productive. While using the tab I thought to myself, wow, if Samsung had released something like this back in 2006, I can totally see myself falling in love with it. But, of course, we are not in 2006 and there is the iPad.

There was one surprise though. The Amazon’s Kindle App. It totally blows the iPad version and even the Kindle e-ink reader itself. The magazine reading is not even supported on the iPad and here I was using the full color version with images on a Galaxy Tab! This, coupled with Amazon’s recent announcement makes me believe that Amazon will be a power in the Android space very soon.

Can’t wait to get my hands on one of those Honeycombs.

Apple is one of the companies about which there are not many internal case studies. From the outside, of course, we can see the ways in which they build and market products, but there is very little known in terms of how they can operate like a 50000 employee strong startup. The Kindle Single, Inside Apple — From Steve Jobs down to the janitor: How America’s most successful – and most secretive – big company really works, tries to provide some insight.

Steve Jobs’ best creation is not the iPod, iPhone or even the iPad, but it’s in fact, an organization that can repeat the same process over and over again. As Steve himself likes to point out, “I wasn’t alive then, but from everything I’ve heard, Babe Ruth only had one home run. He just kept hitting it over and over again.” And that’s what it’s about, find your home run and hitting it over and over again.

This was a very happening week at ZENTITY. First DSL.CZ launched end of last week and become the top app within two days in the Czech App Store, and then today Novinky.cz, which we built for the largest Czech portal and search engine Seznam.cz, launched and become a runaway hit reaching top position within a couple of hours. The team has shown once again that in terms of application quality and innovation they are unmatched in this region.

Download Novinky.cz FREE at: http://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/novinky-cz/id430326937?mt=8

Download DSL.CZ FREE at: http://itunes.apple.com/cz/app/novinky-cz/id430326937?mt=8

It’s actually been a while and I didn’t get to update the blog. But, it is worth sharing that we launched Active 24′s iPhone app in the App Store and it actually made it into top 10.

Grab your copy today. It’s FREE! Download now.

The price of books published by indie authors on Amazon kindle store is slowly falling to $0.99. This is very similar to the iTunes App Store pricing. If I remember well, SEGA was the first major publisher to drop the price of it’s hit game Super Monkey Ball to $0.99 and all hell broke lose. Now we had a quality title selling for the lowest price point and it set the standard for most gaming titles to follow. Super Monkey Ball was one of the early success in the app store and in some part due to its “innovative” pricing. The same seems to be going on in the eBook space and the idea of $0.99 eBooks dominating the store is not too far fetched.

What does this teach us? And what does this have to do with paywalls?

The lesson to be drawn here is that in a competitive market with a relatively low barrier to entry the equilibrium price will be near the bottom of the pricing tier. That in itself is not a bad thing. As the saying goes: we will make it in volume. And indeed some have. SMB paved way for Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Cut the rope et al. Having said that, it’s also clear that this price point will not suite every player in the market and force more pricing innovation.

Enter in-app payments. Apple realizes and works hard to make sure that the apps (or more importantly the developer) ecosystem is healthy. They create the conditions for developers to succeed and in-app payments was their another attempt at helping devs monetize their wares. The developers can now charge for additional content and an increasing number do. IAP were followed by iAds. There will be more pricing innovation and we can expect more from Apple.

Both apps and eBooks are content types where paying for content is the norm. This is made possible by controlling the distribution, delivery and consumption medium (iOS devices and Kindles/Nooks). It helps that the payment infrastructure is built into the platform. The price will not go to free because the economics don’t work (yes, there are zero dollar apps, but they are not a significant money maker for most devs on iOS). I will not touch on Android side of the story in this article so let’s keep ad-supported Angry Birds out of discussion for now.

These developments somehow seem to coincide with the rise of paywalls for content on the web. Of the major publications, WSJ has always had a paywall and arguably it works because they provide time sensitive information (Bloomberg has built a vast empire that way), but last month NYT raised it’s paywall as well. It’s too early to say how successful NYT is going to be with it, but I am not counting on it being a significant contributor to their revenue. A long time ago I remember reading somewhere that you can’t charge for news for a simple reason that as soon as you raise a paywall someone else will make it available for free. This happened pretty fast as The Atlantic found a way to link to NYT articles by skipping the paywall. As TechDirt pointed out earlier – Did The NYTimes Just Offload Its Front Page To The Atlantic?
(http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20110404/00434713761/did-nytimes-just-offload-its-front-page-to-atlantic.shtml).

Where does this leave us?

The conclusion so far seems obvious: if you don’t control the discovery, distribution and preferably end user experience, you won’t succeed with charging for content.

Android is on a roll! That’s what we hear every day in the press and it seems to be true. My personal experience seem to validate this. I must, however, take all this anecdotal “evidence” with a pinch of salt because I work in telecommunications sector and it’s not the best sample.

Every time you speak with an Android user they always tell you about the openness. The platform is open source, you can buy it from any manufacturer and carrier you like, Google doesn’t rule the Android Market with an iron fist. The fact that the platform is sponsored by the bastion of openness Google, only reinforces this myth further. On the surface of it, it would seem that Android is indeed the holy grail of a completely open mobile OS platform. The only problem is that it isn’t. So, what is wrong with this picture? Let’s tackle the issues one by one:

The Open Handset Alliance
We have seen a lot of alliances and foundations come and go. OHA is not much different from a lot of committees in most respects. From what we have seen, it’s still heavily dominated by Google engineers and Google sets most of the agenda. At the heart of Android idea and implementation is ability for Google to push more and more adverts. That’s what the whole thing is about. Google needs be where the eyeballs are and it’s clear that they are shifting to mobile devices. OHA is just a front for Google to push it’s agenda.

Open Source
Android is open source and therefore you can take it and do anything you want with it. But can you really? As Robert Werlinger blogged recently, the only truly open components are camera, GPS, WIFI, Sensors, 3D , Bluetooth, and Market. Needless to say those things alone can’t make a smartphone.

Manufacturers
Openness is about choice. Android must be open because you can get it from Samsung, Motorola, HTC, Lenovo and even Dell.
That must be great for consumers, all that competition will drive down the prices. By that token Windows Mobile (or whatever they call it these days) is open too. The problem, though, is that it’s the wrong indicator. How many manufacturers can sell a platform doesn’t make it open. It only means that there will be a price war, lower margins, weird customizations in an effort to differentiate and overall a fragmented user experience and developer platform.

Carriers
They seem be the weakest link in this chain. They would love to monetize the pipe and get a toll on anything that goes through it. Google seem to be their best hope of doing it. They love rev-share, it does sound good on paper that Google will share the ad and app revenue with them. Apple doesn’t let them come even miles near the App Store, so this is their chance to finally get some piece of the action. Only time will tell. But most likely Google will avoid them like plague as soon as Google would not need them. They should be focussed on bringing true value-add and not just try to behave like toll collectors.

Android Market
I must say, I don’t have much experience with Android Market. I have used it a couple of times and in the Czech Republic you still cannot buy paid apps and developers can’t sell the apps. Only free apps are allowed. Android market is indeed open in the sense that it doesn’t require every app to go through a central approval process. I think Google would love to have the kind of control Apple has over the app store, but this doesn’t work for Google right now. They need to attract the devs to their fledgling platform and an approval process will only slow it down. They are losing both on quantity and quality at the moment, and honestly, this is not going to change any time soon. Anyway, on the topic of openness, the remote kill switch for the apps and homing to Google to verify the authenticity of an app doesn’t seem too open. Where is the outrage?

This is not an Android bashing post and don’t get me wrong, I believe eventually Android will have bigger market share than the iPhone (or Blackberry for that matter). I actually use an HTC Desire from time to time (mostly when I need a MiFi network for my iPad). Luckily I was able to update to FroYo as soon as HTC made it available and my carrier allowed it immediately. Most of my friends were not so lucky though, they are still waiting for Samsung or HTC or their carrier to “allow” the upgrade. That too doesn’t sound too open to me.