something in the way

As I'm sure you know, Sony has been having all sorts of data breach problems lately — namely a million passwords from the Sony Pictures site, 77 million accounts from the PlayStation Network, and nearly 25 million user accounts from Online Entertainment. I was curious how these recent attacks compared to the largest known data loss incidents, so I headed over to DataLossDB. Sony now holds spots #4 and #10 for largest breaches of all time. That can't be good.

Below: a timeline of all known Sony data breaches so far this year, the biggest on April 26 and the second biggest soon after on May 2. More to come?

Early retirement. That's what most people want, unless you're lucky enough to love working. When you have the luxury of retiring early though, why not take advantage? According to OECD estimates for life expectancy and retirement ages, in countries like Mexico, it is common for men to work up to the last year of their lives. On the other hand, women in Austria spend an average of 26 years in retirement.

In the United States the average years in retirement is 10 years for men and 16 years for women (mostly because men typically die earlier)—among the least in the world.

When will you be retiring?

Update: This was recently the topic of a post by Fred Wilson, a very well known VC. I’m riffing on it now because I had an example today that drove it home for me.

Why in the hell are we building native mobile applications when we can just build a web application to accomplish the same thing? Now, I understand that there are some requirements, like camera, that force us into the native realm. But if you aren’t using the camera or some other device-specific API, you should be building a web app.

This is why I love Untappd so much. Untappd is essentially Foursquare for beer. Instead of checking into a location, you can “check-in” what beer you’re drinking. Instead of doing the native app thing, they built a mobile site. I can access it from any device. It uses the browser-based GPS API to get my location so I can attach that to my beer, and there’s no stupid install needed. Just a wonderful web app with all of the functionality I need accessible from anywhere.

I realize there are some caveats beyond the device-specific APIs, but there has to be ways around them. One of the biggies is responsiveness. I think this one is kind of a cop-out because a great web app will be able to create a UI in such a way that it feels just as responsive as a native app. jQuery mobile and Sencha Touch are great at this. The biggest thing is monetization. Currently it’s really hard to monetize web apps and it’s very easy to monetize native mobile applications. This is one of the reasons I’m so jazzed on the idea of the Chrome web store. Being able to make money on web apps could (I think) help change the tide and encourage more developers to go the web app route.

It’s a shame that we’re able to do such cool stuff on the web but that developers are jumping through hoops to lock down their content to specific devices. We’ve got technologies like PhoneGap in the interim, but the sooner we get back to the web, the better.

P.S. My username on Untappd is ryanstewart.

Last week at the Google I/O conference, we announced the public availability of the Adobe AIR for Android Developer Prerelease program. This week, we wanted to highlight a few excellent examples of AIR and Android powered enterprise applications developed by two members of our evangelism team, Christophe Coenraets and James Ward.

Both Christophe and James recently recorded inspiring video demonstrations of some of the sample applications they have been working on lately.

• Employee Directory Application sample using Flex and AIR for Android by Christophe Coenraets
• Android Trader Application with Flex 4 and AIR by Christophe Coenraets
• Flex on Android in Flash Player and AIR by James Ward

Mobile version of Employee Directory application by Christophe Coenraets.

Trading sample application by Christophe Coenraets.

Example of a Flex and AIR application that includes multi-touch support by James Ward.

Congratulation to the team at Graphic.ly for releasing an alpha version of their upcoming desktop application powered by Adobe AIR. If you are or ever have been a fan of comic books, you simply must download this application and take it for a spin.

Features of the desktop application include:

• An application store that allows you to browse and purchase comic books (several are currently offered for free!)
• An activity feed that displays what others in the Graphic.ly community are reading and rating
• A built-in achievement system that recognizes users for discovering new features
• A beautiful, full-screen interface for navigating the pages and individual frames of a comic book
• A social feature that allows you to write comments on individual frames that others in the community can read

The Graphic.ly team describes what they are building as a "a cutting-edge community and digital content delivery platform for comic books, graphic novels and other forms of publishing." I am looking forward to seeing feature iterations of the application; especially as Graphic.ly becomes available on new types of devices.

I know this one is going to hurt those who drink too much iDon’t koolaid, because they never, in their most wildest dreams thought about any other phone beating the iPhone. But it happened, TIME announced their “Top 10 Everything of 2009″ list, and the Motorola DROID ranks on number 1, and the iPhone 3GS took number 4 on the gadgets category.

As a matter of fact, the Barnes & Noble nook is the device that took the second place, and Dyson’s Air Multiplier bladeless, nonbuffeting fan took third place. Now, as we all know, many upset iPhone followers will not believe this, but who cares now. Do you? TIME, of course, is just one magazine saying this, for now anyway, there might be more coming down the pike.

Next, for your reading pleasure, is what TIME had to say about the DROID and the iPhone:

1. Motorola Droid
Everybody likes Android, Google’s open-source smartphone operating system. But a smartphone operating system isn’t all that satisfying without an actual kick-ass smartphone wrapped around it. Now Android has one: The Droid is a hefty beast, a metal behemoth without the gloss and finish of the iPhone, but you don’t miss it. The Droid’s touchscreen is phenomenally sharp and vivid, it has an actual physical (not great, but good enough) keyboard, and best of all, the Droid is on Verizon’s best-of-breed 3G network. It’s Android’s first credible challenge to the iPhone. Price: $300.

4. iPhone 3GS
Take the iPhone. Make it faster. There, you’re done. Yes, the 3GS has a better camera — with video. And it has a compass and voice control. Those are all improvements over the original. But the main point of, and the best thing about, the new iPhone is speed. It has more of it. Period. Price: $200 to $300.

[Via SlashGear]

One day after we called out Google for holding onto the Android 2.0 SDK, it magically appeared on their website. Developers can now grab the new SDK from the official Android site.

Hightlights of the Android 2.0 platform include:

Contacts and accounts

• Multiple accounts can be added to a device for email and contact synchronization, including Exchange accounts. (Handset manufacturers can choose whether to include Exchange support in their devices.)
• Developers can create sync adapters that provide synchronization with additional data sources.
• Quick Contact for Android provides instant access to a contact’s information and communication modes. For example, a user can tap a contact photo and select to call, SMS, or email the person. Other applications such as Email, Messaging, and Calendar can also reveal the Quick Contact widget when you touch a contact photo or status icon.

• Sync support for contacts from multiple data sources including Exchange. Handset manufacturers can choose whether or not to include Exchange support in their devices.
• New way to hover on a person to see more info and select communication mode (for example, phone, SMS, email).

Email

• Exchange support.
• Combined inbox to browse email from multiple accounts in one page.

Messaging

• Search functionality for all saved SMS and MMS messages.
• Auto delete the oldest messages in a conversation when a defined limit is reached.

Camera

• Built-in flash support
• Digital zoom
• Scene mode
• White balance
• Color effect
• Macro focus

Android virtual keyboard

• An improved keyboard layout to makes it easier to hit the correct characters and improve typing speed.
• The framework’s multi-touch support ensures that key presses aren’t missed while typing rapidly with two fingers.
• A smarter dictionary learns from word usage and automatically includes contact names as suggestions.

Browser

• Refreshed UI with actionable browser URL bar enables users to directly tap the address bar for instant searches and navigation.
• Bookmarks with web page thumbnails.
• Support for double-tap zoom.
• Support for HTML5:
  • Database API support, for client-side databases using SQL.
  • Application cache support, for offline applications.
  • Geolocation API support, to provide location information about the device.
  • <video> tag support in fullscreen mode.

Calendar

• Agenda view provides infinite scrolling.
• Events indicate the attending status for each invitee.
• Invite new guests to events.

Media Framework

Revamped graphics architecture for improved performance that enables better hardware acceleration.

Bluetooth

• Bluetooth 2.1
• New BT profiles: Object Push Profile (OPP) and Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP)

New Framework APIs

Android 2.0 includes several new developer APIs. For an overview of new APIs, see the Android 2.0 version notes.

For a complete report of all API changes, see the API Differences Report.