Peter Yared's Musings

This post was also published on CNET and VentureBeat. The new breed of Android devices exceeds the iPhone 5 in every way, including hardware, operating system, and apps. For the past month, I have been using an HTC Droid DNA , which has similar specs to the rumored upcoming Samsung Galaxy S4. People approach me at grocery stores, airports, coffee shops, even on the street and ask me about the phone. The device is indeed quite compelling, even from a distance. The HTC DNA has an amazingly bright 1080p HD display with a higher resolution than Apple's iPhone 5 Retina display. The operating system is modern with dynamic widgets that tell you at a glance what's going on. The apps such as Facebook, Twitter, and such are equivalent to those available to iOS, and Google Apps such as Google Now, voice recognition, and Google Maps are sleek and modern. This is hands down a better device than the iPhone 5, and people seem to intuitively recognize it. What phone would I recommen...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. Virtually every electronic device has now gained a smartphone controlled equivalent over the past year. The well known products in this category, such as the Nest thermostat and Sonos music system , have now been joined with smartphone controlled light bulbs , door locks , refrigerators , security systems , home theater remote controls, game consoles , weight scales , and even vacuum cleaners . Services such as teleconference systems that used to be controlled just by touch tones are now controllable by smartphones. There are even smart device powered telepresence robots . Historically, these types of devices had unintuitive control panels, small, hidden buttons, and other such complex interfaces. The smartphone ecosystem makes is easy for manufacturers to deliver mobile apps as control systems, and for users to intuitively control devices by using a familiar interface. The tech underneath it all This device revolution has be...

This post was also published on CNET and VentureBeat. Zynga's stock has been in a freefall since its initial public offering, and the tech pundits and press have been looking on with schadenfreude as it continues to drop. Zynga is now worth essentially nothing: Its market capitalization of $1.82 billion is roughly equal to the value of its cash and real estate holdings, even with this week's announcements of real money gambling and a $200 million stock buyback . How can a company that brings in $1.2 billion a year, and recently cut costs in order to achieve profitability, be worth nothing? It doesn't make sense. Here's why Zynga is undervalued -- provided it does the right thing next. Zynga is sitting on three widely known and popular potential gaming franchises: Farmville, Poker, and With Friends. Each of these titles is well-known, has broad distribution, and an audience at least willing to check out a new iteration on the franchise. For instance, Farmville 2 ...

This post was also published on CNET. The company has taken repeated hits in the press, but Google+ is fast becoming a social business for small businesses. Compared with Facebook or Twitter, Google+ can seem like a veritable ghost land. I'm finding few posts from friends or interesting people on the service. And it's not just anecdotal observations of there being slim pickings. A recent report by RJMetrics found weak user engagement with the social network. And yet Google+ claims to have an ever-growing number of users. So how has it managed to pull off that neat feat? The not-so-apparent fact is that Google has aggressively integrated its social network throughout its properties, thus driving users to unwittingly use Google+. This is particularly true of Google+'s pages for small businesses, also known as Google+ Local . For instance, when users search for a small business, Google automatically showcases that business on the right side of the page, as part of its...

This post was written with Paul Sloan and published on CNET. With Facebook's stock now half of its IPO price, Mark Zuckerberg and company are testing more ways to make money from advertising. And they can do a lot more. See that image above? That's a plain old giant banner ad grabbed from my Facebook page. It appeared after I logged out. Facebook actually calls them "Logged Out" ads. It rolled them out in February when it was trying to show Madison Avenue it was serious about brand advertising in advance of its IPO. A social ad? Sort of, I guess. It wants me to "like" it to get an insurance quote. But make no mistake: While Facebook can come up with whatever terminology it wants, this is the sort of ad that Mark Zuckerberg has long shunned -- the kind that splashes across the page the way one would expect to see on Yahoo, not Facebook. And yet there it is. Which leads to the question of Facebook's cratering stock price, and the pressure Zuckerbe...

This post was also published on CNET and VentureBeat. For months now, various pundits have been deriding the upcoming Windows 8 as the next Vista. People have made mocking videos showing older people thoroughly confused by Windows 8's Metro tile interface. Indeed, the Windows 8 Metro interface is radically different than the traditional Windows desktop. It's a touch interface. Yet the same pundits that slammed Windows 8 on the desktop are now lauding Microsoft Surface , the Windows 8-powered touch tablet that Microsoft announced Monday. Since the Windows 8 Metro software hasn't changed, what exactly is so different? After all, Microsoft is demonstrating the exact same interface on touch-enabled hardware. And all of a sudden, Windows 8 is making sense. It's not at all crazy to assume that soon all notebook and desktop screens will be touch enabled. Haven't you sometimes just wanted to reach out and touch your MacBook Air or desktop screen, just like you d...

This post was also published in VentureBeat. This article was written for business readers. Due to an outcry from the responsive design community, I added the word "web" to the term "adaptive design" to avoid confusion with progressive enhancement, and updated the text to read that Facebook uses "a precursor to" responsive design, even though very techie trades like RWW say that Facebook uses responsive design . Obviously, the outcry has more to do with the content than the terminology, but it's always good to be pedantic. Read on! Analysts commenting on Facebook’s IPO have highlighted a major issue in mobile computing: that it’s incredibly difficult to monetize on mobile devices . Like many other engineering-led cultures, Facebook has embraced adaptive web design, a precursor to also known as responsive design, where essentially the same code can render itself down from a desktop browser to a tablet to a diminutive mobile screen. Adaptive web ...

This post was also published on CNET. Big Data is in vogue, with a glut of startups and numerous large installations appearing in corporations. At CBS Interactive, we process almost one billion events a day that flow from our Web and application servers over message queues to a cluster of 80 twelve core Hadoop nodes that then feed a Teradata data warehouse. Processing and analyzing such a large volume of data helps us ask important questions: Which pages on which properties are most profitable? Who goes where across our various sites? What types of content generates the greatest number of advertising conversions? But here's the thing: Most of our conversations with product and business managers are spent discussing what I like to call "little data." Little data constitutes the nuts and bolts metrics of running a business. For a Web property, that means getting a handle on issues such as the bounce rate, SEO session starts, social session starts, funnels of how users...

This post was also published on CNET and VentureBeat. Twitter's momentous announcement yesterday that it would only use its patent portfolio defensively was received with wide acclaim by the tech world. With two small changes, Twitter's Innovator's Patent Agreement (IPA) could actually completely change the landscape of software patents. 1. Share patents defensively with any other company that signs the IPA Allow any company that is a signatory to the IPA to use each other's patents defensively. To qualify, a company would have to have at least 10 patents to contribute and no active patent litigation. The minimum of a 10-patent contribution creates a virtuous circle that incents even startups to innovate with patents, as they will get an umbrella of patent shielding from all other companies that have signed the IPA. With this small change, Twitter could spur a wide following of companies that follow suit, as they will all mutually benefit from joining the IP...

This post was also published on CNET and VentureBeat. Research In Motion is reportedly attempting to sell itself after rejecting the former co-CEO's plan to open up its network to carriers . But for some reason it is not pursuing the creation of a lucrative category between smart phones and feature phones -- the super feature phone. Less than a smartphone, but far more than a feature phone What are you left with if you take a smartphone and remove the ability to install apps? It's far more functional than a feature phone, with built in apps for e-mail, Facebook, and a camera. But it's definitely not a smartphone like an iPhone or Android device. RIM's range of devices are fully capable, with integrated apps and cameras, but suffer from a paucity of apps other than an attempt to integrate Android apps. The key to the super feature phone is the ability to use cheap data plans in the $10-per-month range, rather than the more expensive full data plans required b...