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These days, it seems like everybody and their brother is running an app store. What began as closely-controlled walled-gardens of BREW apps for flip phones, curated by mobile carriers charging steep entry fees, grew into Apple’s benchmark term-coiner “app store” and then exploded into a plethora of application delivery platforms. Google’s “Android Market” is hot on Apple’s heels and closing in on a quarter million applications. Commerce heavyweight Amazon has announced their own app marketplace for Android, and several independents (such as AndSpot, AndAppStore and others) have sprung up recently too. Even Microsoft has 5000 apps in their scintillatingly-named “Windows Phone 7 Apps Marketplace”.

Which begs the question – what’s next? I’m going to go out on a limb and make a prediction for 2011: Mobile App Rental. It’s not something you see every day in the desktop application world, but it exists. In the fickle mobile space, however, rental could be a real differentiator. As mobile apps become more tightly-focused on specific tasks, the likelihood that they’re not needed on a continual basis increases. If I’m visiting an unfamiliar city (or country, for that matter), I wouldn’t necessarily drop $1 on an “insider-guide” or offline transit map application for my destination. But if a rental offering was sufficiently differentiated from on- and off-device free alternatives, I’d gladly spend 10¢ to use a copy for a weekend. Another example might be navigation: if I’m headed to a place (say, Canada) where a mobile data connection will cost me extra roaming charges, I’d gladly rent an offline navigation app while I’m there. Once my rental expires, the app store could simply auto-remove that app from my device. Such a model trades off purchase price for volume – people who wouldn’t normally buy your app might be willing to rent it, so you can meet the needs of a larger customer base with less customer risk.

Extending the navigation example, such a model could even be implemented in-app. I use an offline GPS navigation app called CoPilot Live, which normally goes for $10 on the Android Market. My version includes only USA maps – but nothing (except, perhaps, certain app store distribution agreements) stops CoPilot from renting me maps for other countries should I only need them for a brief period. Ordinarily, purchasing the global version would cost me $40 – a cheaper alternative to paying per-diem for a car-rental-agency GPS or overseas data roaming, but still more cash than I’m willing to drop for an app I’ll only use for a few days. But paying $5 to rent that map set for the week? That I would do – it’s a powerful value proposition.

The possibilities really open up when you consider gaming – where extra levels, seasonal themes or bonus features could see greater uptake through a timed rental offering. Then, go one step further – pull GPS location right into the app store, enabling rental apps that expire when I leave the geographic vicinity they target, without ever sharing the user’s location with the app or its developer.

Will my prediction pan out? Who knows – but as developers, manufacturers, OS developers and carriers get more creative with mobile business models, I wouldn’t be surprised to see rentals hitting the streets before too long.

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Most folks have probably seen the commercials: an upper-middle-class family is stuck in some domestic conundrum, then someone raises an eyebrow and exclaims: “To the Cloud!” And soon, thanks to some magical cloud computing wizardry, their suburban snafu is solved.

Working “in the cloud” is great for some things – anyone who uses GMail or manages projects on Basecamp will tell you that – but when it’s the foundation for an entire product, my advice would be: Wait for a sunny day to buy. Microsoft – purveyors of the afore-mentioned cloud-hawking commercials – have, in a fit of ironic self-interest, proven my point mightily.

You see, last year, Microsoft cozied up with Verizon Wireless to introduce the Kin line of mobile phones. Squarely targeted at tweens and hipsters, Kin devices were “cloud-based”, meaning they synchronized all their owners’ personal goodies – such as photos, videos, contacts and social networks – with “the cloud”. In this case, “the cloud” meant Microsoft’s Kin Studio online service. Which, as of the end of March, will be shuttered.

That’d be all well and good if Kin devices were as useful without cloud connectivity as they were with it – but sadly, this isn’t the case. In fact, without Kin Studio, Kin owners’ handsets will have around the same feature set as your typical feature phone. The moral of the story? Before you sink your hard-earned money into a device that derives its usefulness from “the cloud”, or worse-yet sign a 2-year contract to get such a device on a carrier subsidy, learn what might happen if the cloud services upon which your new toy depends should, one day, turn to vapor.

Not long before I went to work for GM in 2005 – which, as an aside, suddenly seems like it was a long time ago! – my Dad sent me a promotional video for the new Audo R10 diesel-powered LeMans race car. It looked something like this:

The first time I watched it – and every time thereafter – I got goosebumps. I remember thinking it did a damn decent job of scooping up most of the emotions that engineers feel when they stand back, and look at what they’ve designed and built, and smile a bit while they think, “yeah, that’ll do.” And not long after I got my first look at a GM fuel cell engine, I remember thinking how great it would be if GM produced a similar video. Just as Audi did, show just enough to convey the complexity of the machine and the care that went into building it.

Well, they didn’t quite make my dream of a top-down, time-lapse, pull-away video of a fuel cell engine build come true, but at least they put forth an inspiring effort on the new Chevy Volt. Here it is:

Lately, it seems like they’ve been popping up everywhere…friendly little 2-dimensional bar codes called QR Codes have been appearing in advertisements, on billboards, and even on this blog! For those not familiar, QR Codes are a type of bar code that can be read by smartphones – including iPhones, Android handsets and Blackberries. They can contain just about any data – from contact information (readily imported into one’s address book) to web site addresses (which open in a mobile browser) or even geographic coordinates (which open a map)!

Because QR Codes offer a recognizable way for smartphone users (who now account for almost one-in-three US mobile phone users) to access desirable content, advertisers, organizations and businesses have been making increasing use of these little black-and-white blocks to add value to customer interaction. For example, catching onto the trend that smartphone users were scanning UPC codes in-store to find better deals on their products, Best Buy introduced scannable QR Codes to their shelf labels, offering a quick link to the retailer’s web site for detailed product information. But, as can happen when marketing departments get ahold of new technology they don’t fully understand, the occasional faux-pas is inevitable… Head past the jump for some photos and stores of QR Codes gone awry…

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Recently, I ordered a new chair. After sitting in one in a customer’s newly-outfitted conference room, and noticing how run-down my current office-superstore-brand task chair was becoming, I decided to upgrade. This afternoon, my new coding throne arrived courtesy of UPS, and I eagerly unboxed and set it up. Two 13mm bolts later, I carried the chair into my office and gave it its maiden sit.

But something wasn’t right. My specimen of this particular chair didn’t feel quite the same as those ringing the conference room table. After 5 minutes, I realized the difference – the lumbar “support” piece – a D-shaped springy plastic affair upon which the chair’s poly-mesh back rested – felt like a yardstick pressed into my vertebrae. Far from the super-adjustable high-end version of the chair I’d first experienced, I realized I had purchased a much more basic model on which this lumbar support was fixed. And held in place by a T30 bolt.

Which is how I found myself at Sears an hour-or-so later, in search of a new set of Torx drivers. In order to remove the offending lumbar support piece, I’d need to remove the bolt through an opening too-small for my interchangeable-bit screwdriver. And as I surveyed the options in the “six-sided fastener-adjusting tools” section, I noticed a selection of various hex-key sets. Ever since my loose 5mm hex key – an essential tool for bicycle maintenance – went missing, I’d been meaning to remedy its absence. This is how men shop.

Hoping to avoid the loss of another loose 5mm key, I opted for a fold-up style set. I had two options: a SAE/metric pair from Allen brand (“The Original!” exclaimed the packaging) for $9.99, or the same array of sizes with Craftsman branding for $25.99. Both carried lifetime warranties. Both seemed durable enough. Both had ball-style ends. Both even had little accessory tabs that could be used to hang the tool from a pegboard. The difference? The former was made in China, and the later in Estes, Illinois.

I set down the set of Torx wrenches and picked up both of the hex-key contenders, realizing that this was fast becoming a “practice what you preach” moment. As far as “things we buy” go, there aren’t that many things sold that are still manufactured domestically. Our government has made it all-but-impossible to do business profitably in this country, and what roadblocks they haven’t put up, labor unions have. So when the issue of buying American-made goods comes up, I enthusiastically advocate for it – and even more so for “buying local” if one can. And now I had a simple choice: pay more or compromise.

I hung the Allen-brand wrench set back on its hook and headed to the checkout counter. The total bill for 10 American-made hand tools was $69.84. Just under $7 per tool, or under $3 each if you count each key on the folding sets individually. And while I realize that my purchase doesn’t affect much of anything on a global scale, it does amount to a single ballot in a very large game of vote-with-your-wallet.

And that new chair? Turns out it was made in Zeeland, Michigan.

I’ve been using open-source software since the late-nineties – I can still remember the intrigued excitement I felt when my friend Seth first told me about a free system called “Linux”, and showed me the LRP box humming along in his attic. In April, nearly two college degrees, countless thousands of lines of code, and over a decade later, I felt that same excitement when I decided to launch my own open-source project. “Deacon” (short for Droid+Beacon) was on its way to becoming a library for Android developers who wished to add push-notification capability to their Android applications. The Deacon library would avoid requiring the use of any third-party server for push delivery, affording complete autonomy for app developers – and embodying the spirit of freedom and choice that the Android platform represents.

In my years as a member of the free software community, I’ve seen plenty of projects come and go, and even witnessed the rise and fall of an empire or two (yes, Gentoo was my daily-driver for a while). But I never really considered just what the creation of a community around a piece of software would entail. As I tend to do, I oversimplified the concept – just “hang out your shingle” (virtually, of course) and the magic of the Internet will unleash a throng of developers and users at your doorstep. Teamwork would flourish, bright people would contribute inspired code, and all would be right with the world.

In the first week of the Deacon Project’s existence, I pulled some late nights and scraped together everything that – in my experience – I felt an open-source project ought to have. I started with a WordPress-powered web site (deaconproject.org), a hosted repository and project wiki on GitHub, and a mailing list. The blog’s first post painted a picture of the project’s inception, and offered a simple vision for how the Deacon push library would take shape. Within hours, I had my first contributor – my good friend and fellow grad-student, Spencer. A few days later, I received an out-of-the-blue email with another offer to contribute – this time, from Toronto-area software engineer, Android-enthusiast and entrepreneur Faisal Abid. The library began to take shape, with plenty of commits and frequent new blog entries.

It’s been four months since I founded and announced the Deacon project, and the team and I have learned a few lessons about open source projects along the way. The project is admittedly still a fledgling, but if you’re interested in hearing a few impressions from our work so far, feel free to hit the jump…

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Want to create a catchy, trendy, and most-importantly motivating ad for something you like? With a budget of … zero? This is how you do it:

Ubuntu from Keith Kenniff on Vimeo.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve watched Linux advertisement competitions – such as the annual contest from the Linux Foundation – with interest. And every year, I’m hugely disappointed. The videos submitted are generally poorly-produced, based on obscure concepts or just downright cheesy. But this one – while it’s a little dated (Ubuntu 10.04 is out now, and we’re just a few months from 10.10) and not quite up to ad-agency quality – I think it’s the most competent thing we’ve seen in a long time. Of course, if you want to see what happens when the heavy-hitters take out their wallets, take a look at these legends:

“The antennas are now diamonds!”

iPhone 4 Diamond Edition: white, unlocked, and $20k