Google Forms are great: they’re dead simple to build, and they can be accessed on the web via Google and (through the use of <embed> code) any other website as well.  Support for email publishing is great, and Google Forms work seamlessly with Google Docs spreadsheets.  It’s been my experience that within small and mid-sized businesses that are already using Google Apps, the internal use of Google forms has become routine.

What’s interesting, though, is that you tend to see them being used much less often out there in the wilds of the public internet.

That’s because Google Forms have one major weakness: unlike within the Google Apps ecosystem, public submissions are completely anonymous – so there’s no way check against users submitting multiple responses to the same form.  Granted, it’s not an easy technical problem: browser cookies are one option, but users can always delete them. Comparing the IP address of each submission against those of previous submissions?  That’s not a perfect solution either: consumer ISPs typically issue dynamic IP addresses, multiple legitimate users could be sharing the same internet connection, and lastly, there are, as always, privacy concerns.

And that’s just the technical side of the issue – from a PR perspective, of course Google has to be very careful about being perceived as being in the business of anything remotely resembling the tracking of users out there on the public web.  Still, it’s hard to imagine why Google hasn’t yet implemented a transparent, user opt-in system to prevent multiple public Google Forms submissions (even if it might reduce the number or submissions).

In the meantime, for all the <embed> code and URL access, Google Forms is essentially crippled as a public web service.

OK, so that’s the web – what about Google Forms sent via email to a private finite set of known respondents?  Here, the privacy issues (both real and perceived) are much reduced – and technically speaking, identifying data could easily and securely be embedded within the ‘Submit’ link contained within each email – but yet, even privately emailed Google Forms responses are completely anonymous (and therefore uncontrolled) as well.  As a result, a Google Forms email survey subject could ‘game the system’ by clicking on the ‘Submit’ link in their single email any number of times.

Conclusion   As a public web service, Google Forms has great potential – but addressing the unique/multiple submission issue would involve technical challenges, privacy concerns, and a potential for third party misuse that are clearly beyond Google’s comfort level.  As a result, any serious use of Google Forms remains limited to within the Google Apps platform.

Sure, a nod has been made towards the public use of the service (Google URLs, <embed> codes, email distribution) – but it seems that Google’s comfortable with letting Google Forms remain merely a Google Apps value-add.

In the meantime, here’s a completely anonymous (and therefore completely meaningless!) Google Forms survey for you.

Vote early, vote often!

#1 Thing You Need to Learn from This Post:

Leaders in Port-au-Prince are hosting the #OpenHaiti Camp on Monday and welcome your online attendance to help them define a Project Worth Doing using open technology.

A More Detailed Exploration:

During my recent trip to Haiti, our group had the opportunity to meet with the organizers of this coming Monday’s #OpenHaiti Camp. This ideas came out of the recent TEDxPortauPrince event and will be hosted at the same venue, EPIH.

Do you have an interest in open technology and open systems? Can you spare 15-30 minutes or more to join in via Twitter and their wiki?  Be sure to RSVP on their Eventbrite page.

Here’s the full event description from the organizers:

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Google+ has been around for a few months now, and while the company is keeping typically quiet regarding the hard numbers, most web traffic analysts estimate that as of November of this year, something north of 50 million users will have created Google+ profiles.

How many of those users are actually active on the service, though, is another story: in our (admittedly anecdotal) experience, a lot of these initially enthusiastic early adapters have tapered off on their Google+ usage pretty dramatically (and even if every single one of these 50 million users were still highly active, that’s still only a 10th of Facebook’s user base).

Inertia?  …strongly in Facebook’s favor.

What’s a scrappy little upstart like Google to do?

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I recently attended a management conference held at the Park Plaza Hotel.  You know, the Park Plaza on Wall Street – in Berlin.

The Park Plaza on Wallstrasse – a month ago when I was first sent the event details, I was struck by the presence of two such iconic big-money New York names in a Berlin address.  That didn’t prepare me, though, for the wall covering I found behind the desk at  reception:  a larger-than-life photograph of three businessmen reaching skyward in ecstasy, as money rained down upon them – their faces equal parts surprise and delight.

Although there’s nothing subtle about the image itself, I was at a complete loss as to exactly what message this curious choice in wall covering was intended to convey – and now, a week and a half later, as current events conspire to make it a more unfortunate choice with each passing day, it only baffles me more.  A playful and self-deprecating comment on unfettered capitalism that went a bit too far?  Not likely, given the German aversion to playfulness and self-deprecation.  An earnest and aspirational celebration of undeserved and amoral corporate profit?  Not likely, given the German aversion to undeserved and amoral corporate profit.

No, it remains a complete riddle to me, the image on this wall.  I mean, are we expected to read something into the fact that these are US dollars (and not Euros) raining down on these supposedly European businessmen, or is that merely the result of using a US stock photography service?  Or a more interesting possibility: are the three masters of the universe  depicted here intended to be American?

As you can see, I’ve thought about this a bit – and here’s another (at least partial) explanation I’ve come up with: the hotel happens to be in Mitte, a former Jewish ghetto in the former East Germany that’s since become maybe Berlin’s most expensive real estate, home to not only a thriving art gallery scene but also to a thriving  internet startup scene (the local Groupon clone down the street was recently acquired by Google, and the online audio hosting company around the corner has become a Berlin startup media darling – complete with an investment from noted technology visionary Ashton Kutcher.

So maybe that’s it – and maybe that’s also why this image feels like such a throwback to the late 90′s (in fact, it would be hard to think of a more loaded image to represent the high-water mark of a good old-fashioned US-style tech bubble than this).  In the end, though, I’d like to think that as remarkable as it is, the interior design of this one particular hotel reception desk is an anomaly – a blip.  I’d like to think that the admirable aspects of the German character written about so well by Michael Lewis in his recent Vanity Fair piece on the country’s exposure to the US and European sovereign debt crises will also come in handy here in Berlin – as the city navigates its way through an increasingly frothy startup market.

There is a prejudice about the Chinese, that they will fake nearly anything.


I will start with a non-tech story a friend of mine from Shanghai told me: a colleague of his bought a Audi A6 in China for a really good price – a “lucky punch”, a bargain.  This made him happy.  A view months later there was a problem with the motor, and as the guy isn’t a great mechanic he took the car to the nearest Audi garage.  A day later the garage rang him up and asked him where he bought the car.  He told them he bought it in Shanghai, but not from an official Audi dealer.  The garage employee responded: “Hm… , well, OK, that maybe explains something, because actually your car is not a real Audi….”   Hard to believe?
I thought this was really priceless, that even German cars are now being faked (‘knocked off‘) in China.

Coming to another kind of fake:  five years ago I have been to one of the official tourist knock off markets in China that specialized in garments, handbags and watches.  I’ve since been told that this market was closed down due to the pressure from all the luxury brands on the Chinese (by the way, I have never seen a bigger Louis Vuitton store than in Shanghai) – so I really thought that the times of these markets were over.  Well, as it always happens in China: if something closes, it remains for this for some weeks and then it pops up in another side of the city…  and now, voilà, it’s not only cloths, shoes, and handbags – the new thing is, they even fake electronics nowadays.  Clearly, the iPhone is the #1 knock off you see everywhere.  And they even have a faked the software on it, the icons look pretty similar and it works more or less.   But if that’s  not enough, all forms of iPods of course, iPads (yes, 1 and 2) and Blackberry knock-offs are available too.   Sure, you’ll see all of our iconic Asian status symbols there!

But see yourself on the pictures (sorry I forgot to take one of the iPhone display showing the operating system).

Last week we wrote about dropbox, and how business concerns can sometimes muddy the waters of what (in a perfect world) should be a transparent and open relationship – the relationship between technology and us humans.

The week before, we wrote about Chrome OS, Google’s view of a cloud-based, thin-client future of personal computing.

Here then, is a post combining these two themes.

The other day, I started playing around with the Chrome Web Store.  We’ve been interested in the Chrome OS since it was a just a twinkle in Google’s eye, and now that devices running the new ‘browser-as-operating system’ are just a few months away from hitting the market, it seemed like high time to check out  these Chrome “apps”.

So I “downloaded”‘ and “installed” a few of these “apps” onto the Chrome browser: a few from Aviary having to do with photo and audio editing, and a music streaming service from from a company called Grooveshark.  Initially, I was pretty impressed – I got it.  Then I started seeing  Adobe Flash prompts popping up when I tried to use the <back> key, and a thought occurred to me – was I looking at a brave new world of Chrome web apps, or was I looking at merely a few simple bookmarks to Flash-enabled websites masquerading as Chrome-specific “apps”?  The obvious thing to do was to try accessing these same URLs directly from a different browser, so that’s what I did – and lo and behold,  my shiny new Chrome “apps” functioned identically on Firefox - without having anything to do with Chrome.  At all.

So mere months before Chrome OS devices are slated to start hitting the market, all three Chrome ‘apps’ I tried out were really just bookmarks to Flash-enabled websites available on any browser.  If you’re Google, that’s a problem.  What bothered me more, though, was how Google chose to handle that problem: by misrepresenting a simple bookmark as an “App” that “requires Chrome” that’s saved via a button labeled “Install” – all of which is followed by a few seconds of a (completely bogus?) OS X-style spinning progress ring!

In short, the simple saving of a generic bookmark is being made to look like a Chrome-specific “application installation”.

I do want to like the Chrome OS, I really do – but that kind of thing, well, it ticks us off a bit (we hate it when our software is being – let’s say – disingenuous with us).

P.S. Maybe the more interesting aspect of this whole story, though, is how Google will differentiate the Chrome Flash (and later, HTML5) user experience from the Flash/HTML5 user experience offered via competing browsers – because if the Chrome OS is going to gain real traction, there’s going to have to be some additional ‘value add’ to the Chrome browser proposition.  In other words, Chrome will have to become extensible in such a way as to allow for optimized (Javascript/HTML5) performance and for more native-feeling (and standardized)  user  interfaces and control sets than those offered by other standalone browsers.

The other evening I decided to finally get around to setting up my home Windows 7 machine to print to the printer hosted by my wife’s XP machine in the other room.  I wasn’t expecting it to take too much time – both machines were already sharing files across our Windows Home Group, I’d installed my share of printers on my share of Windows Server networks back in the day, Windows 7 is the result of a chastened post-Vista Microsoft ‘getting religion’ on user friendliness, and the printer in question was a popular current model from Hewlett Packard.

No problem, right?

Well… problem.  What follows is the sad story of how it ended up taking almost two hours of the limited time I have at home during the workweek to get this done…

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Since moving to Germany I’ve been relying on the Good Reader iPhone app more than ever, frequently referring to a PDF map of the Berlin subway system I have stored locally on the phone.  That got me to thinking…

Question: It appears the security issues involving both Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Flash are somewhat similar (just last month came word of the latest zero-day threat affecting both).  Why then is Apple allowing PDF files onto the iPhone by bestowing the App Store blessing on apps like Good Reader, while maintaining its very firm (and very public) anti-Flash stance?

One one hand, if a head-to-head comparison of Apple’s Preview and Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is any indication, there could well be some truth to Apple’s low opinion of Adobe software: as we’ve said before, it’s hard to come up with another instance in which two applications that do exactly same thing differ so much in quality and usablility.  Preview is lightweight, fast-loading, and features a very nice contextually-based search function – all qualities utterly lacking in Acrobat Reader.  That the inferior product is made by the same folks who design and maintain the platform itself is even more remarkable.

On the other hand, maybe Adobe’s code isn’t so uniformly horrible after all – maybe there’s another reason Apple is perfectly OK with letting their mobile devices not only view PDF files but also to store them locally, while Flash is treated as if it had some type of digital cooties. I find the most-often offered rationale – that the advent of HTML 5 is upon us and will make Flash unneccesary – to be a bit of a red herring.  First of all, HTML 5 in any meaningful form is still years away.  Secondly, significant issues remain to be worked out, while the various competing browser-builder agendas have made reaching agreement on something as basic as the underlying codecs an exercise in cat-herding.  Also consider that HTML 5 has yet to address ad serving, encryption, and digital rights management – which, for all its faults, Flash has.  In short, the Flash platform offers the tremendous advantage of a standardized layer of abstraction across multiple browser implementations, Adobe’s figured a lot of things out about getting a video stream from point A to point B across the internet, and the platform works well enough to have prevailed in the open market – it’s not going anywhere soon (for more on why, here’s a post worth reading – from, of all people, an HTML 5-loving Google/YouTube engineer).

Answer In Cupertino, though, animosity towards Flash runs deep, and it runs strong.  So much so, in fact, that what amounts to an anti-Flash manifesto was recently published on company website – written by the CEO himself, no less.  What could be differentiating factor between Apple’s very different attitudes towards Acrobat and Flash?  We think it could well involve an as-yet unannounced push by the company to attempt to solve the stubborn problem of getting internet video onto your television.

After all, at the intersection of internet technology and consumer electronics (the Apple sweet spot), the getting the internet television experience right (as opposed to the computer-dependent internet video experience) is undeniably the big prize – the ‘elephant in the room’, a market with the potential to dwarf even the smart phone market.  There’s that pesky little problem of Flash, though – any 3rd-party technology simply won’t do if Apple is to go to the trouble of getting into internet video in a big way, given the company’s vertically integrated business model.  That’s why there is not, and will never be, Flash on the iPhone (until the day the App Store model itself is successfully challenged in court).

Prediction With iTunes, Apple’s already shown that they know how to make selling premium digital content over the internet user-friendly enough to work.  They just blew through their Q3 earnings forecasts and they enjoy a level of brand loyalty unmatched within the CE industry.  With all that in mind, it’s almost obvious in what direction the company’s headed in next:  Within the next 1-2 years, look for Apple to launch a new Apple TV box and maybe even a standalone internet-enabled television with Apple TV baked in and an RF cable interface for backward compatibility  -  all to access a new and dramatically enhanced Apple TV service.

A standalone Apple television?  Well that’s just crazy talk, you might say.  However, bear in mind two points: they have the monitor manufacturing supply chain and expertise already in place, and (maybe more importantly) it’s the hardware where Apple makes their money, not the software.

While that’s not exactly a new opinion here at digitalmissive, it bears repeating.  Pure conjecture?  Yep. (But remember, you heard it here first – OK, maybe not first, but early on enough to make it interesting).

Obstacles Flash?  Small pickings – Apple has clearly made the determination the Adobe Systems is a company that can be dissed at will (or, given the current Apple market cap, even acquired).  No, the real challenge for Apple here is that any plan to get into internet video in a big  (i.e. Ipod, iPhone) kind of way would of course require going up against the vested interests of the highly lucrative, heavily regulated  (and even more heavily lobbied) industry that is broadcast/cable television.

If, with all that he has going for him, Jobs still decides not to go for the ‘brass ring’ of consumer electronics that television represents, it can only be that a clear-eyed assessment of the power and entrenchment of the incumbent industry players will have dissuaded him from mounting the challenge.

Adobe is clearly well within the envelope – but doing battle against a unified Comcast/NBC and Viacom?   That’s another st0ry entirely…

And even if you’re Apple, sometimes you have to pick your battles.

(The opinions expressed above are entirely unaffected by whether or not I own Apple stock – there aren’t that many digitalmissive readers out there – but in the interest of full disclosure, I do)

Grab a seat, sit back, and enjoy the show as the two uncontested giants of their field appear destined to wage a battle of epic proportion…  If it’s Google and Apple we’re talking about, developments on several fronts just this past week have only contributed to the inevitability of just such a scenario:

• Apple goes into advertising (the iAd platform that’s an integral part of the just-released Iphone OS 4)
• Google’s Android mobile OS makes solid advances in the high-growth Smartphone market (Gartner recently reporting that Android will overtake Apple’s iOS by 2012)
• Both companies continue to quietly work away on the last frontier: the stubborn problem of implementing a viable lean-back  internet video solution (I have a hunch that Apple is leveraging their monitor expertise and building a television)
• Both CNET and the WSJ report that Google is planning to unveil a music streaming/download service tied to their search engine, while Apple works to move iTunes from a desktop app to the cloud.

Meanwhile, although largely overshadowed by World Cup soccer, this past week also saw the start of Wimbledon – so if the uncontested giants we’re talking about are Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, recent events also offer the possibility of a similar clash of the titans.  If the two can manage to make it to the mens’ singles finals, tennis fans around the world will grab a seat, sit back and enjoy a show of their own: a rematch of the 2008 Federer-Nadal Wimbledon final, often considered the greatest tennis match ever played.

It’s maybe a good time, then, for a few thoughts on Google (arguably the Roger Federer of consumer internet technology) and Apple (perhaps the Rafael Nadal of consumer electronics)…

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It’s frustrating being a part-time blogger.

It happens again and again – I get interested in a bit of news, I think to myself “I should write something on that”, I make a few notes, and I plan to get back to it in a day or two when I’m less busy.  Meanwhile, though, the story continues to evolve, and one of two things happen:

• What I intended to write actually pans out (in which case  my remarkably insightful observations come off reading more like “I knew that would happen…” than the pearls of digitalmissive wisdom they could have been)

…or…

• What I intended to write turns out to be exactly wrong (in which case I guess I’m lucky to have not gotten around to writing anything in the first place).

Such is the case with the iPad.

We first reported on the device over a year ago (here) – but since the device has become a reality, we haven’t had the the time to keep up (other than to make a quick observation on how the launch-day twitterati predicted how short-lived the immediate bump in Apple’s stock price would be here).

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