The uxebu incubator

We always tried to make time available for other projects, open-source work and R&D type of work. We pushed out a lot of cool stuff, such as TouchScroll, EmbedJS, HumanAPI, StorageJS and apparat.io. We even were spinning around ideas of giving everybody at uxebu the option to seed-fund their own idea/startup from uxebu funds by creating an incubator. We never were really able though to launch something into its own life – customer projects did a great job sneaking themselfs into our other projects with sometimes too high priority – you probably know exactly how this feels :)

Why switch?

Back in our consultancy life, uxebu was doing pretty well, we had tons of fun, were able to travel, support the community and much more. So why would we ever even consider making the move? The answer is not a simple one, there were lots of facettes to it and a lot of gut feeling – but some of the things we talked about were following:

The team

We are incredibly lucky to have such an amazing team of talented, creative and great to be around people on board and it almost felt odd not to try to build something together, which could have impact on the development of the web – yes we had very cool customer projects, we did stuff which was difficult to solve, but it never quite felt like we as a team were working on achieving a common goal. By working on a single idea, we finally had the chance to work together with the whole team, which was not possible when working for customers.

Maybe this video by David Pfahler and Stephan Boennemann can give you some idea (see all videos here) ;)

It was really difficult, keeping customers and projects separate

We always tried to make as much time available as we could for working on open source projects, we even launched a product apparat.io. apparat.io was the project which blatantly made clear to us that we were not able to move at a speed which we had in our minds – releases got delayed due to other more important deadlines, features got cut, ideas were dumped and in general, stuff happened about four times slower. It was painful because we saw the potential and failed to make it happen.

We couldn’t stop thinking about building our own ‘thing’

We wanted more and were hungry for building something for the long run, we wanted to get away from working on projects which would start and end again a few months later. At almost every hackcamp with the team (the only chance we all got to see each other were these events, since we all work remotely) the same discussion came up again and again. There were ideas for new products flying around and we just had to take the chance.

The right idea

Tobias Schneider started working on Gordon, a Flash player written in 100% JavaScript, sometime in late 2009. We continued working on it with a team of four members in early 2011 and reached support for Flash 8 and AS2 in August 2011. The experience we’ve gathered along the way, building a Flash 8 / AS2 runtime in JavaScript, made us think about incorporating the work into the long term vision and mission of uxebu.

Bikeshed was born

There is a clear shift happening today in how we can re-think building tools, in our case tools for the web, built using web technology. There is an amazing amount of potential in creating tools, targeting mobile and touch devices first.

Because of fundamental changes in technology, we clearly see an opportunity to build better tools and help people to transform their ideas (for example a beautiful game, or animation) and thoughts into reality.

And with that we have set out the first two release milestones for the second quarter of 2012:

Bikeshed Flash to HTML5 conversion

The Flash to HTML5 conversion will allow you to convert Flash 9/10 and AS3 projects into HTML5. HTML5 which you will be able to reuse, change, adjust and even incorporate into new projects. The conversion will be an online service, so there is no need to install software – just upload your SWF and we give you HTML5.

Bikeshed JS

Bikeshed JS is a JavaScript graphics API, inspired by Flash (we hope we were able to take the good parts ;) ), which will be open sourced under the MIT license as well as used in the converted Flash to HTML5 results. With Bikeshed JS you will be able to create beautiful and creative content for the web, such as games, animations, info-graphics, dashboards and much more.

So here we are today, in the middle of our first two major releases, our consultancy past feels like years away. We hope that you will find the stuff we’re working on useful, that we can inspire you to create beautiful content for the web and that our tools will take a tiny part in pushing the web forward.

If you are curious, follow @bikeshedjs and take a peek at http://bike.sh in the future.

And until the release, sit back and watch some of the videos we created over christmas 2011 :).

Follow @bikeshedjs for more *mysterious* information or visit bikeshed on the world wide web.

I know, I know, it’s been too long since we’ve met. But let me make that up to you by this monster post. An Xmas special! Not because all the participants in this episode played nice with each other. Oh no, they most certainly did not. It’s a full out war! But more because, well, Xmas-eve is tomorrow :) So, let’s see how threw what mud in which direction and why.

Mind you this is about three weeks worth of news, out of order, so some of it might be a little “old”. Then again, I guess anything in this industry is old if it didn’t happen today…

Apple probably covers 25% of this post. So let’s start there.

It turns out Apple does not hold rights to the names iPhone and iPad and was unable to persuade a judge otherwise. That means it cannot sell their devices under those names and has to come up with new names for them. This is not just annoying for Apple, but could also have an interesting effect where it might affect the global name. I mean, if there are five bazillion devices called foo, doesn’t it make sense to rename those other few million devices to foo as well? Then again, it might give Apple the opportunity to give the device a name that’s more suiting to the Chinese language. We’ll see. For now, the iPhone 4s isn’t even available in China.

Apple fought a few more battles in the past few weeks. For instance, Google [NL..] asked the European Commission to investigate Apple for abusing patents. Of course, Google already faced these investigations themselves, so I guess they knew the right people to complain to.

Regardless of Google’s efforts, the EC is targeting Apple anyways, but this time regarding ebooks. They think Apple made illegal price arrangements. Who would have thought.

Over in Germany people might soon forget about Apple. Well okay, maybe not. But the Germans be able to get their hands on an iPhone or iPad as long as this ruling stands. Seems something legally backfired for them as Samsung is fine in Germany, for the moment. Although sales are fine for the moment, this is just until stock runs out (it seems).

Apple also struck out at the other side of the planet, where they lost a tablet case in Australia versus Samsung (who else). They won an earlier case but it got overturned and now that overturning was reconfirmed by another judge. Poor Apple.

I guess they thought so too because it was discovered that Apple “sold” some patents to a patent troll so that it could sue pretty much any other phone manufacturer. Of course the troll never even mentions Apple in their cases. Isn’t that nice.

And to kick a … company when he’s down, Samsung follows up with four new lawsuits regarding patents. Joy!

Apple didn’t lose everything though. They won a case against HTC that’ll prevent them importing new devices starting April 2012. The victory is a bit hollow though since it’ll be enough for HTC to do some minor adjustments to get away with it.

Over at RIM things aren’t running very smooth either. They had to give up on the BBX (“BlackBerry 10″) name for their new platform due to existing trademarks.

It was also report that that Amazon but also the duo of Microsoft and Nokia might be interested in buying RIM. Not many seem convinced that this would be a good move for either, though.

And on an ironic story twist, there first was news of a jailbreak tool for the PlayBook being released. Later came news that about 5000 PlayBook units were stolen from a truck. Maybe they broke out themselves?

By the way, the EFF is seeking to make jailbreaking devices legal. That’s pretty much a “duh” if you work in this industry but I guess they got away with it once and now it’s just legacy to be legally allowed to prevent jailbreaking.

Finally, for RIM, there seems to be some controversy over announcing a device and reasons for postponing it. Not sure what to think of that.

Moving to shocking news from HP. They sold their last batch of TouchPads two weeks ago. The interest in this firesale apparently brought ebay and paypal to their knees. Quite an achievement since both server parks are supposed to be able to hold quite some traffic.

The final decision for WebOS was also made by the way. It’s becoming open source. The internal memo also surfaced. Although HP is maintaining they could still be making tablets with WebOS in 2013, I’m not convinced that the platform will stil be relevant by that time. There’s been a lot of speculation over what open sourcing will mean for WebOS. So far it means an empty repo with a few pull requests. Why not open source it first and then announce it?

HP also has a new logo by the way. An interesting move since you’d think they have bigger things on their mind right now than investing in a new brand logo (and replacing any and all things that contain the old logo…). At least they could do it completely in web technology…

Enough about HP, let’s talk about Dell. Well, we can be quite brief about Dell. They announced to stop producing Android tablets. I’m not sure if the world noticed.

Microsoft is up next. Warning, this section actually mostly contains positive stuff. Mostly.

They pushed out Silverlight 5 with h264 decoding support. It also has better 3d support for XNA programming. SL5 is rumored to be the last version of Silverlight…

They also open sourced the azure SDK (which runs with Node.js!). And unlike the empty WebOS repo, Azure is actually open sourced on github! Yay for them :)

In a more general move to open source, they announced that the Windows8 store will allow contain open source as well. That’s a nice move.

Microsoft launched a new social network (so.cl), specifically targeting students. Not sure whether that’ll ever evolve to a platform to be reckoned with. But hey, at least they’re trying.

In another round of good news Microsoft also announced that IE will start auto-updating from Windows XP onward. To be very honest, I’ve not been forced to bother myself with cross browsers so I wouldn’t even know about that shit anymore, but I can certainly see how it should make everybody’s life easier. Let’s hope this will be the final-final-yes-we-are-sure-its-dead-final nail in the coffin for IE6. Probably not.

Microsoft wasn’t all sunshine and butterflies though. They won a patent case against Motorola (ahem, Android), although only one of 6 patents were actually found to be infringing. This patent covers being able to schedule stuff in the calendar through email. Found too obvious by the EU, it seems it’s not so obvious for the Americans. Ok, whatever. We’ll have to see whether Motorola will start paying for the patent, exchange patents or will simply remove the feature from the few phones that have it.

There’s also a game for the Windows Phone that uses a certain engine, the “Unity3d gaming engine” that’s released by Microsoft. The pun here is that the same engine is restricted to be used by other developers or companies. Oopsie?

Moving on. Google seems to get more heat lately. Now there’s a senator that recommended the FTC to put Google under a tight watch.

Android has been sued by BT for infringing some of their patents. If successfulness this could mean more expensive Android devices. Nobody wins here.

The only other Google related news is that after a long time, Google and Mozilla signed a new agreement where Google pays Mozilla for being the default search engine in their browser. It’s rumored that this deal concerned nearly 300 million dollar.

In random news, the Indian minister asked big content sites to manually filter user generated content and apply censors where they see it fit. How ignorant can you be?

In Holland there seems to be a second Diginotar case as another certificate authority (Gemnet) was hacked. This hack seems to be less invasive, although the hack was made through a phpmyadmin interface. Ouch, how amateurish can you get? There were also some bad certificates being distributed by KPN, which puts the blame on the sudden load increase and having to train new people quickly because of this. How about “Sorry sir, you’ll have to wait”? Meh.

There was some news about Carrier IQ (the mobile keylogging crapware?) regarding the FBI. There was a “freedom of information act”-request for more information about this which was denied on grounds that it might interfere with some kind of investigation. Speculation ensued. Carrier IQ tried to squash this speculation but I think a statement like this is doomed to fail. And it did.

In the world of Ubuntu, Java might be a thing of the past replaced by OpenJDK (thanks @cramforce). There will soon be an “update” to remove Sun Java from Ubuntu distros completely as the license for Ubuntu has run out. And replaced by OpenJDK, which is now the lead version for Java 7. Wait wut? Wasn’t Java open source, open platform, freely available, bla? What the hell is going on here.

The mega merger of ATT and T-mobile has been canceled. ATT basically pulled the plug after the American government initially reject the move. On top of that the EC also had some problems with it. Interestingly enough, this 38-billion-something dollar deal now comes down to a 2-billion-something freeby for T-mobile, due to cancellation terms in the contract. Nice catch, T-mobile. This pretty much means the end of ATTT.

And finally, I woke up this morning to see Twitter on fire with protesters because GoDaddy (the biggest American domain company) published a blost post to support SOPA. Oopsie. They’re catching quite some flack from this (and are losing quite a few registered domains in the process) and might inadvertently have started a raging ban of any company that supports SOPA. Nice job!

I find the case of GoDaddy especially interesting because it seems to me like SOPA is mainly something that concerns people on the web. GoDaddy gets most of their business from these people. So if they support something that would be bad for the web, their sole purpose of existence, would they seriously not expect flack from this? Or has the GoDaddy company (d)evolved to such a level where it’s just monkeys running the company and techies only doing the actual work. Le sigh.

With that, I conclude this episode and wish you happy days from the Uxebu team! :D

Follow @bikeshedjs for more *mysterious* information or visit bikeshed on the world wide web.

Follow @bikeshedjs for more *mysterious* information or visit bikeshed on the world wide web.

Follow @bikeshedjs for more *mysterious* information or visit bikeshed on the world wide web.

Follow @bikeshedjs for more *mysterious* information or visit bikeshed on the world wide web.

Follow @bikeshedjs for more *mysterious* information or visit bikeshed on the world wide web.

Follow @bikeshedjs for more *mysterious* information or visit bikeshed on the world wide web.