Apple Acquires Rapid-Fire Camera App Developer SnappyLabs
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
https://web.archive.org/web/20131010012005/http://www.snappy...
I wonder why they took it down.
Middle path, present focused, to an extreme, enforced on you whether you want it or not :)
I wonder though: in these situations if he were to refuse the acquisition would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation) and bake it into the iPhone regardless? I think Microsoft did something like this, no? Any thoughts?
And Apple has over a hundred billion dollars in cash and eighty thousand employees. They could certainly clone this software if they wanted to.
The reason to acquire is to signal to other people that doing innovative things on apple platforms can make you a millionaire, instead of signalling the same thing is a sucker's game as apple will steal your ideas if they're any good.
This is my biggest worry with my product. I literally spent two years going down dead-end alleys to refine my Information Flow Control System because there was nobody that I could copy from. We often hear "Ideas are worthless. It's the execution that matters." which is true but knowing what does and doesn't work is as important in my opinion.
Apple now knows you can capture video very efficiently with JPEG. People now know, if you want to build a powerful social media product, you'll have to use real names and so forth.
I can't back this up with citations as I don't remember where I read this from, but it basically said innovators are usually not the ones that benefits from their innovations. It's usually those that tweaks the innovations that benefit the most.
I guess the message is, if you do have something innovative, you should probably patent it. You might not be able to protect yourself from larger companies, but you'll certainly improve your chances of being acquired.
Although half of that is retail, which isn't going to help in software dev.
To call it a "decent iPhone app" somewhat puts down the 12 or so months of hard core research and implementation that jpap put into it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_laws...
Apple has certainly done this before:
Apple Literally Stole My Thunder https://medium.com/wwdc-round-up/253aed27a455
Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/apple_copies_rejecte...
Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC http://www.macworld.com/article/1035200/konfabulator.html
Apple stole Karelia Watson http://forums.macworld.com/index.php?/topic/2477-apples-stol...
It was a different time when the images/weather app was rejected by Apple. They were deliberately trying to prevent people creating thin wrappers around websites and calling it an app. And at the start it made a lot of sense.
Syncing over WiFi was a feature that users had demanded long before that app had been around and the name/logo are not distinctive. They are the most common sense choices you would use.
And widgets existed decades before Konfabulator thought to bring them to OSX. They were available as Desk Accessories in the previous versions of Mac OS as well as on Windows/Linux.
It's pretty clear this was just two people coming up with the same logical icon concept simultaneously.
The article states "I’m not naive enough to claim Apple actually took my idea." You apparently are, though.
> Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo
C'mon. "Wi-Fi Sync" is hardly a surprising name for such a feature, and making its logo the bog-standard Wifi logo with a bog-standard Sync logo superimposed is hardly a surprising choice either. It was a long-expected and long-awaited feature.
> Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC
A controversy about the bog-standard term "widget".
> Apple stole Karelia Watson
Well, it made its own version and named it cheekily. This seems to be the one mostly valid case in your post.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...
Look at SnapChat turning down $3bn from Facebook and now FB integrating a lot of that functionality into Instagram.
I think the App was more about the implementation than the idea. He created extremely efficient implementation of jpeg compression with 50000 lines of C++ code as far as I remember from the dev's blog. So Apple is obviously more interested in the guy than anything else.
What I'd like to add that, it apparently SnappyCam would only make sense on iPhone 5 or lower. That is because iPhone 5S already can do what SnappyCam does in its native Cam app by holding down the shoot button. Perhaps Apple got other ideas for its use in the future.
"but also the UI is well thought" -> "but also the UI is well thought out"
pap andria polous
Wow! I had no idea! That's very cool. I was also very impressed with the 5S's slo-mo capture. It's exceptional quality for 120fps.
I understood he first optimized the algorithm, then tuned it to be even faster on ARM?
http://www.amazon.com/JPEG-Compression-Standard-Multimedia-S...
My memory is a bit fuzzy here, but from what I recall, a friend tried implementing JPEG compression on a parallel system (back in the mid 90s). One of the trouble spots was the reliance on the relationship between blocks regarding prediction of the DC coefficient.
One startup I worked at, we had an entropy encoding method that could add 20-30% additional compression just by recording coefficients. Patent here -- http://www.google.com/patents/US6236762
So there's a lot of room in optimising the process
> I have a feeling that soon SnappyLabs is going to have Apple knocking on their door with a very nice offer.
I say this as someone who was contacted by a VC firm recently. They were interested in investing, but their assumption was that we wanted to grow and "exit". When I asked for clarification on what "exit" meant, I was told that it means to sell the company. I was confused as to why someone would want to sell something they spent so many years creating.
(That said, I think in this case their tech will genuinely improve Apple's software. And maybe they get to continue doing passionate work at Apple. It just feels like they are no longer in control.)
I would certainly call that congratulatory worthy.
If that was part of the nature of the deal, then I could see it being quite attractive.
Innovation shapes Apple, Apple does not shape innovation.
No doubt Apple put a very lucrative offer on the table, but another route could have been for the author to dual-license the code - GPL it so the community benefits, while any improvements he can then push out in his app which he continues to sell.
It seems like Apple might replace their iOS JPEG implementation with his, and all developers on iOS will benefit from the very fast image encoding routines.
If Facebook acquired this then the technology would be accessible to a far greater audience than just the users of Apple products.
Seems to me that we should want advances in technology (software or hardware) to benefit the greatest number of users possible, and with Apple owning this it now restricts this method to only those who use Apple products.
Oh, just noticed your username.
Edit: Being downvoted? Do I have to do the defensive thing of pointing out I own Apple products too?
If Google or Samsung thinks it matters to their users, they've got more than enough $$$ to fund something for Android specifically.
I'm unclear why we are arguing whether this technology is somehow better off in the hands of one monopolistic, predatory giant instead of the other monopolistic, predatory giant.
The way to make this technology truly accessible to a far greater audience is to make it open. Everything else is quibbling over which King has the softer boot on the neck :-)
Except for those with a phone older than the 5S, who now can't use this feature anymore because Apple wants to sell them a new phone.