So, I’m watching the Android video and talking with my friends who are developers. Man, I thought my videos were boring, this one takes the cake.

Steve Jobs does NOT have to worry about losing his job to the folks from Google.

I didn’t see ONE feature that will get normal people to switch from the iPhone. This comes across like something developers developed for other developers without thought of how they were going to build a movement.

How do we know this developer API is uninspired? They are bribing developers with $10 million in prize money.

Compare to the iPhone. Steve Jobs treats developers like crap. Doesn’t give them an SDK. Makes them hack the phones simply to load apps. And they create hundreds of apps anyway. Now, Apple is getting is act together. Early next year an SDK is coming. So now developers will have both sexy hardware, a sexy OS (under iPhone is OSX, an OS that’s been in wide use for years now), AND a well-thought-out SDK.

But, here’s why Android is getting received with a yawn from me:

1. It was released without a personal approach. When Steve Jobs brings out new stuff he does it in front of people. Not in a cold video (as much as I love video it doesn’t inspire the way sitting in an audience does and getting to put my own hands on it).
2. This stuff is still vaporware. No phones are available with it. At Microsoft I learned DO NOT TRUST THINGS THAT THEY WON’T SHOW ME WORKING. Remember Longhorn? Er, Vista? The first time I saw it was largely in a format like this — it looked cool but it wasn’t running anywhere and they wouldn’t let me play with the cool demos. I’ll never make that mistake again. If you want my support for your platform I need to be able to use it and show it to my friends.
3. The UI looks confused. Too many metaphors. One reason the iPhone does so well is because the UI is fairly consistent. Fun, even. How do I know this? My ex-wife hates technology and she bought one and loves it. I try to imagine her getting a Google Android phone and getting very frustrated with a mixture of drop-down menus, clicking metaphors, and touch metaphors. At some point she’ll give it back and go back to the iPhone, which only presents a touch metaphor.
4. No real “love” for developers. Heck, I don’t know of a single developer who has had his/her hands on Android. And all we get is this cold video that just doesn’t inspire me to believe in the future of the platform. I know Dave Winer didn’t feel the love from the Open Social “campfire” event, but at least there we heard from quite a few third-party developers. That made me believe in the platform because I knew that they had already gotten at least SOME third-party developers on board. Heck, remember Facebook? Go back and see when I got excited by Facebook. It was two weeks after the F8 platform announcement. Why then? Because I saw that iLike got six million users in two weeks and was staying up. So, that communicated two things to me: 1. that the platform attracted interesting developers. 2. that Facebook was well enough architected to stay up, even under pretty dramatic load. Android is a LONG way from demonstrating either of these things to the market.
5. Google needs to get atomic videos. On an announcement like this there shouldn’t have been one long video, but rather 50 small ones, each demonstrating a separate API. Developers today are busy. Fully employed. They want easy to understand instructions for how to integrate platform stuff into their stuff. It’s amazing that Google itself doesn’t understand how its own search engine works. If it did, they would see the advantage of creating lots of video, not just one (because then they would be more likely to get found for a variety of search terms, not just a few — it’s one reason I create at least a video every day and it’s paid off very well for me). I’m giving Vic Gundotra the same advice — his long Open Social “campfire video” should have been cut up into the atoms that made up that video. Sure, put the long complete video up too (the molecule) but cut it up. Yes, yes, I know, I don’t take my own advice but then I have an excuse: it costs money, er time, to edit video and I don’t have a lot of it. Google doesn’t have that excuse.
6. Google’s PR comes across as “only caring about big bangs.” Last week I was in the Open Social press conference. Everyone else in the room worked for a big-name media outlet. Business Week. Wall Street Journal. Los Angeles Times. CNET. Barrons. etc. etc. Even TechCrunch was relegated to a phone-based seat and wasn’t in the room. That tells me that Google’s PR doesn’t get the value of small people. In fact, if you were tracking the mentions of that press call you’d have seen my use of Twitter during it got mentioned many times on blogs. Google’s PR didn’t seem to even understand why Twitter was important. They also kept me from using my video camera during the press call (the only reason I got video is cause I carried a cell phone with me — they asked me to leave my professional camera out in the car). Compare that to presidential candidate John Edwards who let me film, even on his plane during “off times.” And he has a Twitter account too.
7. It looks too much like a poor copy of the iPhone. They didn’t talk about ONE thing that the iPhone doesn’t do. Where’s the car integration? Why didn’t they focus a LOT on GPS, or video creation, or something else the iPhone doesn’t do. Do we really want to spin a Google earth map? Really? That doesn’t turn me on. Showing me Kyte.tv working on this thing would turn me on — that’s something the iPhone doesn’t do. Showing me killer podcasting-creation features would turn me on. That’s something the iPhone doesn’t do well. Instead we get some video game that we all played 10 years ago. Yawn. OK, OK, I know Android plays Quake and the iPhone doesn’t. But, come on, we all know a game API is coming for the iPhone and is that really going to get a lot of people to buy Android?

Anyway, so far I’m disappointed in Android. Maybe they’ll get it together, but until then I’ll remember the Russian Government official’s cell phone. He’s running Windows Mobile. Why? Cause developers in his community are building stuff for it. I’ll keep checking in with him to see if Android has gotten any traction.

Are you sensing that Google is just not very good at technology evangelism? After all, look at how successful Google has been outside of search. It hasn’t really had a good home run that we can point to outside of that. I think that’s because Google is coming across as too arrogant, too interested in only “important developers and people,” and doesn’t understand how to pitch end users and developers at the same time (developers only really come after end users do anyway, look again at the iPhone).

But what do I know, I’m just a blogger, right?

UPDATE: Patrick, on TwitterGram, says “it looks like a ripoff of the iPhone.”

UPDATE2: other responses are rolling in from around the Internet. Engadget. GigaOm.

Yuri Ammosov, who lives in Moscow, Russia, and works in the Russian Ministry of Economics demonstrates why Russians aren’t cool.

1. He isn’t using an iPhone.
2. He isn’t using Facebook.
3. He’s reading blogs.
4. He’s running Russian RSS-reading software.
5. He reads Engadget, B5 Media, and TechCrunch.
6. He’s running Windows Mobile.

So yesterday. So uncool.

Just kidding.

Seriously, I spent a while with Yuri today and you should watch out for him and his band of Russian entrepreneurs. They are doing very cool things and I was jealous of the feed reader and the new interface he showed me on his Windows Mobile smart phone.

Now do you understand why Google announced Open Social and Android? I sure do.

There’s a lot of Russians who are going to buy cell phones and join a social network in the next 18 months. What will THEY be running? Will they think YOU are uncool for what YOU are running?

Longer interview coming soon on ScobleShow.com.

The news business is totally commoditized. Don’t believe me? Look at TechMeme this morning. It’s all about Google’s Android mobile platform announcements. All the time. Whew.

Instead of trying to compete with the news crews who have written endlessly I just went to Peets, got myself an iced latte, and filed this report from my cell phone.

Oh, don’t expect to see much about this on my link blog, either. There’s too much discussion about it so far.

My two cents?

1. How come there’s no talk about building devices that integrate better into automobiles? I think Microsoft is WAY ahead here.
2. This is a platform, not a hardware device. Andy Rubin, on the call, said that we should expect 1,000 GPhones.
3. There wasn’t much specific about how this platform beats other operating systems like Symbian and Microsoft’s. Big selling point for Android? It’s open source. Will that lead to end user innovations? We’ll see. So far I haven’t heard anything that’ll make me sell my iPhone on eBay.
4. I like Google’s strategy of giving stuff away to developers. It’s the right strategy, but like with last week’s Open Social announcements by Google there are a LOT of unanswered questions. I guess we’ll see how good this OS is when the Android SDK comes out next week.
5. I hope we really see some innovative new devices like a great podcasting phone, or great integration into your car’s environment. But those kinds of fun things are going to be off in the future and Google seems to want to be a platform player, and seems to be avoiding going up the stack for now. We’ll see if that holds out over the next few years (I suspect it won’t).

Anyway, fun Monday morning.

How news spreads…

Dave Winer just called me and said Apple is coming out with an iPhone SDK next year.

How did he know? It’s on Twitter. Not on TechMeme.

MacNN has the story. I just got up, so more to come after I clear my head.

What will this enable? Tons more apps like what Mike Cannon-Brookes (CEO of Atlassian) is showing me here.

My reaction: wonderful news.

UPDATE: as of about 10 a.m. it’s now on TechMeme. Interesting, I’ve seen this behavior several times before that news will break over on Twitter about an hour before it’ll get on TechMeme.

UPDATE 2: at about 10:45 a.m. it moved to the top of TechMeme. I just read my feeds and the story broke somewhere around 8 a.m. this morning.

I was over meeting with the CEO of Atlassian, Mike Cannon-Brookes, today about something else (they have some cool news coming soon) but when I got there Mike was showing off his new iPhone and it had a bunch of icons that aren’t on the “Steve Jobs approved” version. So, I had to start up my Nokia to show you what he’s using. Here’s a good description of how to load apps on your iPhone.Isn’t that ironic? I have to carry two cell phones: one to surf the Web on (the iPhone is a lot better at that than the Nokia), among other things, and one to do video. Hmmm.

Anyway, if you look at the other shows on my channel today you’ll see these videos, all done from my cell phone:

1. My favorite beach.
2. A brief tour of Atlassian’s tech support department where you meet the top architect too.
3. The guy behind Wikipatterns.com.
4. A brief video of BluePulse’s CEO, Ben Keighran, who is getting ready to announce some killer mobile phone stuff at CTIA next week). Interesting fact is that their office is in the original YouTube office.

Oh, and coming soon on ScobleShow.com is the full robotic helicopter video.

The folks over at NewTeeVee just announced its new conference schedule for a conference about NewTeeVee.

I find it severely lacking.

First, why feature Joost? They haven’t proven that they’ll survive in this new TV marketplace. I’m willing to bet that Justin.tv or Kyte.tv will have 10x the traffic in a year than Joost. Even TechCrunch is growing bearish on Joost’s future. Why is Joost going to have trouble? Because they wanted to replace TV and the TV networks will NEVER give Joost their best stuff.

But let’s face it, it’s still a YouTube world online. What will change that?

So, what else is missing at a discussion of new TV stuff?

1. Best practices of old on new. The best example of oldTV coming to newTV is what ABC.com is doing. Ever watch Lost over there? I have and it’s the best stuff out there. They are using technology from Move Networks. That stuff blows away Joost. To me THAT is “new TV.”
2. The best advertising technology I’ve seen is CastFire. I don’t see them on the program. I do see Brightroll. That’s good, I have a 24-minute interview with the founder on my show. Nexidia showed me a bleeding edge technology that’s already bringing new kinds of contextual ads to several TV stations’ local news shows.
3. The biggest innovator in streaming media is Chris Pirillo. The way he uses chat. His sponsorships. And the way he uses YouTube is very innovative yet he isn’t on the program.
4. Codec comparisons: DivX has some of the best codecs out there. It also has a set top box that I’m playing with and its Stage6 community is pretty neat. DivX’s CEO was on my show at CES earlier this year. Adobe is doing a bunch of work. So are other folks. Can we see a shootout? Or techniques to get the sharpest picture online?
5. Apple? No, they have nothing to do with “new TV” right? Well, I haven’t been able to get them on my show either, but Rocky uses Apple’s FinalCutPro to edit my show.
6. Adobe? I see one guy on there as part of a panel discussion. Are we going to learn anything in a panel?: No, we won’t. But the folks who bring us Flash deserve a lot more than a panel slot. Not to mention they have a video editor, Premiere. Oh, and my video with the engineering team behind Flex/Flash talking about its architecture got hundreds of thousands of views.
7. Microsoft? They want to get market share away from Adobe. I see Dan’l Lewin there, but you do realize he isn’t a technical guy and he hasn’t built any video or done any video on the Net, right? He was a co-founder of NeXT, though. Maybe that’s the closest to Steve Jobs you could get.
8. Rocketboom? They just shipped an iPhone app. They have the best distribution system I’ve seen for an independent video blog. Andrew is still doing innovative stuff. Where’s he?
9. Blognation? (Or ANY blog network other than GigaOm?) They are about to put video bloggers in dozens of countries. But not gonna be at NewTeeVee I guess. And because they are a competitive thing to GigaOm they get locked out the same way that PodTech gets locked out. If I ran a conference I’d invite my competitors to speak. Why? Cause my first responsibility as a conference planner is to the people who come. See Eric Norlin’s video for more on planning a great conference.
10. USVP? They invested in several video ventures (including PodTech, Zannel, and National Banana). Not gonna be there and they should be. Heck, let’s get out of stuff that’d help me out. Last night I had dinner with Stewart Alsop. He’s an investor in Justin.tv. Why isn’t he on the VC panel? Justin is doing the most innovative stuff in the streaming video space.
11. Tracking and uploading? TubeMogul, for instance, showed me how they can let video bloggers upload to multiple sites and track their results. Compete.com’s CTO was on my show too. I wish someone would do a session on new ways to demonstrate audience engagement and size and all that.
12. New ways to tell video stories? YourTrumanShow showed me how, for instance.
13. Mixing 3D world’s with video? I don’t see that either. But Scenecaster has a way to do that. So does Second Life. More on the way. I’d love to hear the latest and see what Eric Rice and friends are up to.
14. Why not a session on video vs. audio? There’s a lot of interest there and it sure would be interesting to see if BlogTalkRadio could make a case for audio. You noticed my son’s first sounds on the Internet were audio only, not a video, even though I had lots of video gear there. Heck, I sure could learn something about getting better audio quality.
15. Facebook? MySpace? LinkedIn? Plaxo? Facebook is one of the hottest video sites on the Internet yet I see nothing about it. That’s really lame and missing where a TON of “new TV” action is happening.
16. Building a social network around your video site? Magnify, Ning, and Broadband Mechanics might have something to say about that. In fact, Magnify shows off a great “new TV” site to me. Ning showed me their stuff too. So does BlogTronix, which has a system that lets companies build sites very similar to the Channel 9 one at Microsoft. Ning will be at the conference but, again, only on a panel. That’s not the help that people need — they need demos of what’s possible, not more talk.
17. Legal issues with new TV. How do you get rights to music, other people’s videos? What’s the rules around fair use?
18. Mobile video? On my show Buzzwire showed off its solution. Also, Radar.net showed me a way to share videos with your friends from your mobile phones. Kyte.tv’s CEO is on a panel discussion but I doubt they’ll do a demonstration of how that works. It really is mind-blowing what you can do on a cell phone now.
19. Streaming video? Ustream came on my show to demonstrate what it’s doing. Veodia is aimed at big companies with a better quality streaming video.
20. Mashups? YouTube is now showing videos on top of Google Earth. Plazes is giving us location-based presence. What could we do with that?
21. Film sites. Jaman is very impressive, for instance.
22. Webcasting? IVT showed me its solution. So did Adobe with its Connect service.
23. New kinds of Web experiences that’ll have an impact on how video is used. Zude got my “demo of the year” mark and demonstrates new ways to use video online. Mixercast is a cool way to mashup video, pictures, and other stuff too.
24. New hardware gadgets for video producers? Drobo showed me a new hard drive system, for instance, that we’re using at PodTech and love. I’ve been testing out tons of the latest gear including a Nokia N95 with Kyte.tv and a new Nikon pocket camera that has wifi built in. Heck, get Ryan Block of Engadget to come out and show off the latest gear. That dude has a ton of gadgets in his house and he always knows what’s good and what’s not.
25. Real Networks? Do they have a shot at sticking around? They came on my show to demonstrate its new player which lets you save from YouTube.
26. Search and Discovery. MeeVee demoed its search engine. Blinkx CEO came on my show to talk about it (then later took his company to an IPO). Dabble’s founder/CEO showed me its cool search portal and community for video. Stumbleupon came on my show to demonstrate its cool video discovery service.
27. Why don’t I see anything on Windows Media Center? TV Tonic showed me a killer system that’s getting lots of traffic for video bloggers.
28. Video greeting cards? Smilebox showed me theirs.
29. Video email? EyeJot showed me how to do it.
30. Bleeding edge ways to use video cameras? Get Andy Wilson from Microsoft Research to come down. He showed me a system that was wild.
31. Ways to make money with your “new TV?” Edgeio showed me a classified ad system that a few video bloggers are using to bring in some extra cash.
32. Splashcast has been seeing massive growth through its Facebook application. They came on my show a few months ago to demonstrate its widget and media distribution network.
33. What’s the future of home entertainment systems? Seagate showed me its version at CES. I just interviewed MediaMaster too (mostly music right now, but video someday soon) and they have a very awesome service. Videos of that coming soon.
34. Screencasting for fun and profit. Don McAllister, who publishes screencastsonline.com, came on my show to talk about how he does it.
35. Google? They do this thing called YouTube. You might have heard of it. Marc Lucovsky showed me how to “bling my blog” with a video bar, too.
36. Video education? Winnov showed me an innovative system for universities to use.
37. Loic Le Meur’s Seesmic (here’s me talking about it). If you really want to be known as “NewTeeVee” you gotta have them on the schedule.
38. Zannel. I interviewed them this week and they are competing with Seesmic and Kyte.tv.
39. UPDATE: I totally forgot Bittorrent. A guy I know downloads all of his TV shows via Bittorrent (and movies and music too). I’m sure he’s not alone so a conference like this should discuss that and what the industry should do for or against it.
40. Serving an international audience. Look at the new Pop!Tech videos. They have subtitles with eight languages in them. That really rocks. But what do you need to do if you want to serve China and keep your videos from getting censored? How about transcriptions so that search engines can work better? Etc.

$500 for this? Damn, maybe I should start charging for my show! I give you a TON more content for free! :-)

Heck, we can even meet over on my newfangled Kyte.tv channel and have a live chat. With audio, video, AND good old text, even!

Oh, and keep in mind I +HATE+ panel discussions. They look great on the Web site, or in a brochure (that’s why I added them to my conferences when I planned them). But you rarely learn anything you can take away and apply to your keyboard. I was just on a panel discussion too at the recent Facebook conference and, while it was entertaining (a good fight on a panel is one way they can be redeeming) I watched the video and didn’t see anything anyone would have learned from it.

UPDATE: Om and I had a nice talk this morning and he’s severely constrained by time (this is a one-day conference). More on that conversation hopefully later in next week.

If you were doing a conference on “new TV” what would you put on it?

I just interviewed Daniel Graf, CEO of Kyte.tv. Kyte just shipped a bunch of new stuff today, including a new player (you’re looking at it now), new API, new iPhone playback and chat, and a new KyteFeed where you can subscribe to other channels. Permalinks to specific shows instead of just the channel. And much more. In this 20-minute conversation Daniel and I explore some of the changes and what they mean. Kyte also now works on any mobile phone.

Sorry for the scratchy audio. I was just using the microphone built into my MacBookPro and it didn’t come out that well.

Reuters reports on a new iPhone killer (Verizon’s claim, not mine) that’s coming soon from Verizon. Sounds great. Can’t wait to try it. I doubt people will wait in line, but who knows?

Ahh, maybe this is why Steve Jobs lowered the price to $399 for the iPhone. Now that seems like an even more brilliant move.

Some things I’d like to see here:

1. What maps are on the system. I use Google Maps all the time on my iPhone and I notice that even Patrick and Maryam are using it a lot too.
2. What stock quotes are on the system. I use Yahoo’s stock prices several times a day on my iPhone.
3. What’s the experience like? It’s one thing to put a touch screen on a device. It’s a whole nother thing to make it a thrilling experience. Even my ex-wife (the one who hates technology so much she moved out of Silicon Valley to get away from the geeks) loves her iPhone. Will the Verizon devices get the same kind of evangelical fervor going? We’ll see.

OK, I’m taking quite a bit of heat from the Zune advocates in my comments — lots of them think I’m an idiot for bagging on Microsoft. So, here’s a challenge.

I’ll give you one hour of airtime on ScobleShow.com to make the case for the Zune. You gotta come to my house in Half Moon Bay, CA to do the filming. I’ll treat it just the same as I do any other demos out there. You just bring your devices and explain to the world why these are so cool and why I need to buy one. I’ll even have Patrick bring all his iPods and iPhones so you can have those to compare with, if you’d like.

Call me if you’re interested and have access to one of the new Zunes. If you’re a Microsoft employee or a PR representative even better. I always leave my cell phone on my blog, by the way. It’s over there on the right side of my blog, but my number is 425-205-1921 (local call from Microsoft headquarters! Heh!)

Tons of people on Twitter are reporting problems with their iPhones. Including my son. Including Jeff Clavier. Anyone else having this problem? These are people who have not unlocked their iPhones. I’m about to update mine and will report what happens. A bunch more reports are over on TechMeme and Dave Winer is tracking them too.

How about you? How did your update of your iPhone go?

Oh, and Patrick’s iPhone lost all of its data. Made worse because his Mac had a bunch more problems (this is the second time it’s been in the shop) and so he’s praying now that Apple didn’t delete everything off of his hard drive.

UPDATE: My iPhone update seems to have gone well. New icon on home screen says “iTunes.” Meanwhile the Twitters from people with updates that didn’t go well continue to come in. Here’s another one.