Now that Yahoo is gradually untangling itself from Chinese e-commerce site Alibaba, does the U.S. Web portal's future look any brighter? Not really.

Yahoo's agreement over the weekend to sell half of its stake in Alibaba for $7 billion ends a longstanding feud thaty wasn't benefiting either company. With Yahoo's share reduced to 20%, Alibaba Chief Executive Jack Ma now has the control needed to steer the company in any direction he chooses. For Yahoo, the deal means it can take the $4 billion it gets after taxes to boost its stock price through a buyback. Investors seemed to like the deal. The company's stock ended regular trading Monday up roughly 1%.

Despite the immediate bump in share price, how beneficial the agreement will be over time is debatable. Nothing has changed for Yahoo in its struggle to compete for ad dollars with Google and Facebook. Currently, the company has no clear strategy, having lost this month its second CEO since September, when tough-talking Carol Bartz was fired for failing to turn the company around after 32 months at the helm.

Her successor, Scott Thompson, resigned this month after it was discovered he listed on his resume a computer degree he never earned. The current chief executive, Ross Levinsohn, holds the title of interim, so any turnaround is likely to be delayed until he gets the job permanently or someone else is hired.

Behind the scenes, Yahoo has a new board that includes investor activist Daniel Loeb, who uncovered Thompson's resume problem and used it to force his departure. Loeb likely gave his blessing to the Alibaba deal and is expected to have lots to say about the new CEO.

Loeb, who owns almost 6% of Yahoo through his hedge fund Third Point, waged a proxy battle against Yahoo, because he believed the stock was undervalued due to incompetent management. The Alibaba deal, which Thompson is credited with pulling together, should improve the company's share price, but analysts disagree over the long-term benefit.

Alibaba Chief Executive Jack Ma

Gene Munster of investment bank Piper Jaffray dropped his stock rating from buy to neutral, saying Yahoo is selling its most valuable asset, given the projected growth of China's largest e-commerce site. Under the Alibaba deal, Yahoo will hold on to 20% of the company until its expected initial public offering. Yahoo will sell half at the IPO price when Alibaba goes public, and the remainder if its IPO is held by a specific date, which appears to be before December 2015.

"We believe an argument could be made that Yahoo! will be missing out on the upside of a significant portion of its stake despite holding the other half until Alibaba’s IPO," Munster said, according to Barron's.

With the Alibaba asset being reduced, shareholders should be looking at Yahoo's core business, which isn’t showing much life in the online advertising market. "We believe the turnaround of the core company is likely to be a slow, multi-year process now that the company is again working with a new CEO," Munster said.

On the flip side, analyst Colin Gillis of BGC Capital, gave Yahoo stock its first upgrade following the deal announcement, according to Barron's. In raising the stock from hold to buy, Gillis saw just the opposite, saying Yahoo benefits now from the sale and will benefit later when Alibaba goes public.

So, no matter who's right about Alibaba, Yahoo still has to come up with a growth strategy. It doesn't have a social networking story like Facebook and Microsoft powers its search engine. That leaves it with display advertising, which isn't expected to be a growing business. In addition, the new board will be hands on and very active in guiding Yahoo's future, along with the new CEO.

Put it all together, and Alibaba is only the first act of a lengthy drama.

Yahoo photo by jay.tong; Jack Ma photo by nosillacast.

Facebook's Open Graph is too tempting for app developers. All they need is the slightest bit of permission from the user, and then they can go nuts posting all kinds of app activity for all that person's friends to see. Some apps can't resist the chance to promote themselves, and they run the risk of disrespecting their users. Here's a case study.

Facebook's Open Graph allows for so-called "frictionless sharing." In practical terms, that means sharing activities in an app without requiring an intentional click of a share or like button. And for certain kinds of applications, it's a great idea. Some people like to share their music listening habits, for example, and apps like Spotify and Rdio make it easy.

But the benefit to the user is often less obvious. If the user is reading smutty tabloid articles or politically sensitive Storify posts, he or she might not want to broadcast that to every Facebook friend. Apps that use frictionless sharing require people to be constantly vigilant, and that's an unrealistic expectation.

Frictionless sharing certainly helps app publishers promote themselves, but they can easily take advantage of users to do so.

The most rampant abuse of user trust occurs in the process of getting permission to turn on frictionless sharing in the first place. Many apps flip the necessary switches without asking, forcing users to opt out - if they can figure out how.

A Case Study

Yesterday, Showyou released an update that enables Facebook Open Graph sharing for its video-loving users. The workflow that enables sharing illustrates the line between respecting and disrespecting users.

The first step is to have good release notes for the update. Showyou puts Facebook Timeline right at the top. That's a good start.

When you launch the new version, the first thing you see is a dialogue about Facebook Timeline. Showyou did a great job wording this. It's perfectly clear what the app is asking, and the choices are "No Thanks" and "Yes, Please!" Do you want to automatically share the videos you watch on Showyou with your Facebook friends? That should be an easy question to answer.

I tapped "No." Check out the user settings after this dialog.

The first Facebook-related thing I see is "Facebook Sharing," and that's on! That's not what I wanted. But then, below that, I see that "Facebook Watch Sharing" is off. Ah! Having read carefully, I see what happened. Showyou asked if I wanted to share the videos I watch to Facebook, and it respected my wishes. But it went ahead and assumed that videos I share on Showyou should go to Facebook, too.

The app almost got it right. It respected my choice about sharing the passive act of watching, but it took the liberty of assuming I would want to share the same videos with all my Facebook friends that I share with my Showyou friends.

Don't Make Assumptions

Mark Hall, CEO of Remixation (maker of Showyou) explains that "videos you share on Showyou are already getting added to your public grid," referring to the Showyou Web view, which is visible to the public. "We thought most people would want to have [Facebook sharing] on, so friends would see that new videos have been added to your grid."

Hall's assumption goes too far. Just because I shared a video in a way that is publicly visible does not mean I want to push that action into my friends' Facebook news feeds. I might want to, but not without being asked first. In a user's mind, sharing on Showyou is not connected with sharing on Facebook, because Showyou never told the user it was turning on such sharing.

Showyou's next version will do the right thing, though. "In our next update," he says, "we're going to move these permissions into a second step on install (for new users)." That's all it needs to do. Many people will likely want to use these features, but the app shouldn't turn on any of them without asking.

Developers, don't be afraid of users' preferences. Open Graph actions surely seem like a tempting way to get the word out about your app, but it's not worth leaving your customers feeling burned. More importantly, it's not worth irritating their friends with constant "frictionless" updates. Those are the people you want to convert, right? People happily share from apps they think are great. They do it on purpose. Help them stay in control of what they share, and they'll respect you back.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock

Now it's easier than ever to nosh while you're posting a status update. Ordr.in, a Google Ventures-backed startup, offers a Facebook app that turns ordering food for delivery into a social experience.

“Food is inherently social,” David Bloom, CEO of the five-employee New York City shop, said in an interview. “It lends itself well to Facebook.”

At its heart, Ordr.in is an API for building social food delivery services. Restaurants share their menus with Ordr.in and pay a commission every time they receive an order through the application. The app can sit on a restaurant’s fan page or website and, as its tagline suggests, "turn fans into customers." That has been a big criticism of Facebook by companies that have set up brand pages but haven't managed to monetize them.

When a person orders using Ordr.in, the app pushes the order to their Timeline, presumably prompting friends to say “You know, sushi sounds good.” The app lets users choose the verbs “Crave” and “Eat” to supplement their feelings about a particular eatery beyond the usual “Like.”

The menu choices are slim, for now - there are, for example, no restaurants listed in Boston - and even Bloom says his firm has some distance to go before it perfects the model.

“We like it, but we’re definitely not satisfied with it,” Bloom said. "With Facebook today, you don’t know what is going to work. You can’t just take an offline shopping experience and fit it into Facebook. Small companies like ours are nimble and able to adapt. We’re going to figure it out.”

The restaurant industry has traditionally been behind the curve in adopting new technologies. That may be changing: At the recent National Restaurant Association convention in Chicago, a four-day survey of the 59,000 attendees indicated social media the third most important issue for restauranteurs.

“The stereotype of restaurants as technologicals laggard is often true," Bloom said, "in large part because the day-to-day activities of the business are not conducted on a computer screen. They know this is important, and they’re getting smarter about technology. I think we’re going to see a lot of catching up over the next few years.”

Today's theme is wild technology. We homo sapiens-type people are proud of our technology, but we'd better give credit where credit is due. Lots of other species can literally eat us without having to invent any weapons to help them.

Some can even outsmart us.

This rich infographic goes into depth about the amazing eyes of some of the world's hardiest species.

Here are six animals that are so smart, it's creepy.

Namit Arora contemplates the inner lives of animals in this intriguing essay.

Japanese scientists have invented a "dolphin speaker" that may enable us to communicate with our marine counterparts.

Maybe we should learn a thing or two from the animal kingdom. Rachel Armstrong has put a new spin on Arthur C. Clarke, arguing that "any sufficiently advanced civilization is indistinguishable from nature."

But just to put us in our place, here's a two-minute supercut video of animals seriously messing with people.

Image via Shutterstock.

Past entries from Read/Write Daily

Twitter was blocked in Pakistan for much of Sunday because it would not remove tweets that were considered "offensive to Islam." The tweets were encouraging the Draw Muhammad Day (#DrawMuhammadDay) competition, which prompted users to post images of Islam's Prophet Muhammad to Facebook. Even though some of the images posted were favorable, many Muslims regard any depictions of the prophet as blasphemous.    

There were conflicting reports of what was blocked and when. Despite the outages, Pakistan's Minister of Interior, Rehman Malik, tweeted that Twitter and Facebook were not going to be blocked in the country, and asked citizens to "please ignore the rumors.

Twitter spokesman Gabriel Stricker said Twitter had not taken down tweets or made changes before Pakistan stopped blocking the site.

The ministry restored access to Twitter on Sunday evening.

Earlier this year, Twitter announced that it would be "blocking certain tweets in certain countries," yet it did not go into explicit detail about what types of tweets it was referring to.

Pakistan went ahead and banned many curse words from texts in November 2011. Many of the words appear to be made up.

Flag image via Shutterstock.

With the lackluster first day issue of Facebook on Friday, we thought we would take a moment to look at the memorable tech IPOs of the past and see how they have fared over the years. While the first day "pop" of some companies can generate news, what is more important is the longer-term performance of the stock - say, after three years of trading. The chart above shows some of these percentage gains – and losses.

One of the more memorable first-day increases was the doubling of share price for Netscape Corp. when it went public back in 1995 to raise the then-unheard-of sum of $1.6 billion. That's less than 2% of what Facebook raised on Friday. Akamai raised twice what Netscape did in 1999 and had an increase of more than 450% in its first-day share price, only to fall to Earth three years later (thanks to the tech bust) and trade at 1% of its offering price. Ouch. Even Apple had "only" a 31% increase when it raised $3.4 billion in 1980 at its public offering. Three years after its IPO, it was down 25%. (Now is another story, of course.) And Paypal, which made billions for its owners and spawned an entire ecosystem of startups, was trading flat from its IPO three years later.

The biggest three-year percentage increases of popular tech stocks were Yahoo, with a 3,500% increase from its IPO, and Amazon, which rose more than 2,700%. Both benefitted from being on the right side of the tech bubble when they went public. Yet Yahoo has had its problems, as we have documented in the past. The last time its stock price broke 100 was at the end of 1999, and it hasn't been anywhere in that neighborhood since then (right now, it is trading in the teens). Certainly, tech stocks are hot right now, and many – apart from Cisco and Microsoft – are close to their all-time highs including IBM and Amazon, both trading around 200.

One interesting trend not shown in the numbers is that all of the recent tech IPOs have come into the public markets with dual classes of stock shares, meaning that the public shares carry less voting rights (or in some cases, absolutely none) when it comes time for that annual shareholder meeting. Google will have three classes of shares next month: one for the founders, one for the public and then one with absolutely no voting power whatsoever that it will issue for dividends, employee incentive plans and acquisitions. LinkedIn, Zynga, Groupon and Yelp all have dual-class shares. James Surowiecki, writing in the New Yorker, says that this may "make the stock market less central to American capitalism." A sobering thought indeed.

So what can we learn from this trip down memory lane? Just this: The first three years of a public tech company can be very chaotic times with regard to its stock. Some of the most successful companies didn't make much money for normal shareholders. So if you are going to invest in a startup, start early, in its pre-money stage. Of course, that is pretty risky, too.

When your job is to be open to everyone's ideas, sometimes the hardest part for you is to just go with the right one. In Part 2 of ReadWriteWeb's interview with Internet Society (ISOC) senior public policy manager Sally Wentworth (Part 1 of which was published on Thursday), we discuss how difficult it can be to navigate the routes of change in Internet architecture, especially when everyone out there - ICANN, Comcast, Russia, etc. - seems to have a different idea.

While maybe hundreds of white papers are published every day leading off with the statement that the Internet is changing so very rapidly, with respect to its technical underpinnings, real change has been dreadfully slow. The exodus of Internet Protocol hosts to an IPv6 address system whose benefits are almost undisputed has yet to begin after nearly two decades of initiatives. And the top-level domain system that helped make Web addresses friendlier to the world than phone numbers is rapidly disintegrating into a bizarre carnival of conflicting interests and outrageous conduct. It's a state of affairs that gives justification to proposals like that of Russian President Vladimir Putin: that the Internet be brought under more direct governmental control.

 

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Scott Fulton, ReadWriteWeb: It’s hard to take a look at just what’s happened in the past few years, with respect to the opening up of the Top Level Domain system by ICANN, and not say there’s been a little bit of chaos there as a result of it. It seemed to many a good idea at the time to diversify and take the proposition of building top-level domains into a multilingual system one step further and expand it into a multi-social system. I myself spoke out in favor of the .XXX top-level domain, because I believed that it was useful to give people a very easy way to turn off a certain channel of content that they don’t want to see.

But since that time, I was cooking dinner the other day in my kitchen, and I had one of these basic cable channels on. And one of the ads was trying to sell me on the idea of getting my own .XXX domain name, the reason being that I should get mine before someone else does. Almost an implied blackmail there: If I’m a sensible person, then I don’t want my name associated with porn. We’re starting to see an opening up of the idea of private interests purchasing their own top-level domains, building up more on-the-fence TLDs like .vegas. Which makes me think it’s going to be hard to make the case that a deregulated model for Internet governance always works. When you have a chaotic example like that, it’s easy for someone like President Putin to simply point to the .XXX domain and say, “Look what happened there! Do you want this to happen to the rest of the Internet?”

Isn’t the final solution maybe something in between complete deregulation and complete government centralized control?

Sally Wentworth, Senior Public Policy Manager, The Internet Society: We have never said there is no role for government or for public policy. There is a role for public policy at the national level, and in some cases, there are quite good examples of international cooperation among policy makers. I’m not sure we’re talking about an either/or. One question is, how is the policy developed? Policy that’s developed in the back room, with limited transparency and a small number of interested parties, is likely not going to produce a result that is going to be good for end users or the Internet itself.

“Policy that’s developed in the back room, with limited transparency and a small number of interested parties, is likely not going to produce a result that is going to be good for end users or the Internet itself.”

- Sally Wentworth, senior public policy manager, The Internet Society

The question is, how is the policy developed? Who is allowed to participate? And is there sufficient sunshine/transparency/collaboration/participation by the relevant stakeholders in developing the policy so that a good outcome can be produced for that country, for that community? There are plenty of public policy initiatives that are quite useful. We see emerging a large number of broadband plans around the world, ICT strategies by governments to help promote the deployment of IPv6, strategies to try to address things like cybersecurity or consumer protections. These are all constructive, but again, it’s the direction of, can you do this, or are governments doing this in a way that is participatory and transparent and involves the relevant stakeholders, or is this just the providence of a few people in a room making policy for everyone?

RWW: I spoke a few months ago with Richard Jimmerson [who leads ISOC's Deploy360 IPv6 awareness campaign] about ISOC’s efforts to incentivize the transition to IPv6. He told me a story about how a lot of commercial vendors are failing to explain IPv6 to their customers because they can’t come up with the “value-add” message: “IPv6 gives you _____” They don’t seem to be capable of filling in the blank. If ISOC truly is the multistakeholder model that you want it to be, how come so many companies, after so long - since IPv6 has been with us for decades - don’t have an understanding of the tremendous benefits that IPv6 offers?

SW: I think sometimes it is a matter of selling the story. Also, the resources haven't yet to come to a point where there is a requirement to transition.

We are seeing quite a few companies worldwide now that see [IPv6] as an imperative. The question now is, can we convince them to build it as a transition, rather than them being confronted with a problem at some point? You want this to be a smooth transition to IPv6 rather than a difficult one, so they can be able to test it. So sometimes these technical issues aren’t as front-and-center, but... this is fundamentally good for the overall Internet. And there will be a transition; it will happen.

RWW: It’s hard to say that’s inevitable. I’ve covered IPv6 since the 1990s, and I’m starting to think the IPv6 transition might not necessarily happen in my lifetime anymore. It doesn’t seem to want to be a one-time event. It’s not like the VHF-to-digital transition in the United States, where we just threw a switch.

SW: Oh, no, absolutely not. I was at the White House when we did that! Very different!

RWW: The VHF transition was a magnificent success, for all intents and purposes. I think it went very smoothly, and that had to have confused millions of people who, despite all the news, didn’t quite understand what was going on. Their TVs weren’t working! But we made it work, one way or the other. And you’d think that if it were as simple as throwing a switch, we’d engineer the switch, and we’d have Microsoft and Red Hat and all the operating systems vendors create in their systems something that’s an obvious switch for the administrators to throw. And say, “On January 14, 2014, you press this button.” What’s to stop them from doing that?

SW: It’s hard because IPv4 is not going to disappear after a certain date. There will still be content and devices that depend upon IPv4. So what’s going to happen is - and we’re already seeing it happen - IPv6 is going to live on alongside IPv4. I think there will be - and there increasingly is - a move by companies, as they see others in the marketplace and as they see it’s good for their long-term business interests, they are making that transition. They're deploying IPv6 already, and many of their devices are ready for it. There will be a preponderance of traffic that will move to IPv6. But it will not be a switch like the digital television transition.

It’s also not something that’s necessarily visible to the end user. I may or may not be aware of whether my network is running IPv6 or not, or whether my device is IPv6-capable. This is going to be something that happens over time as devices and content become IPv6-accessible.

Administrators do need time to test this in their networks, and that’s why we do things like World IPv6 Day last year, and World IPv6 Week this year. The goal this year is that you turn it on and you leave it on. Last year, a lot of companies had a chance to turn it on, test it, see what went right, what went wrong, where we needed to do more work. What we also found, though, is that a lot of companies left it on, because they didn’t have the problems they thought they would.

 

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Photo credit: The Internet Society, 2012

The idea behind Amazon's Mechanical Turk is pretty simple - break programming work down into bite-sized chunks, and put it in front of a large workforce that can do the work quickly and cheaply. Part of the challenge of that is making it easy for requesters to create the bites that workers are chewing on. The new categorization app from Amazon removes some of the hurdles of creating HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks) that ask workers to pick the best category for items. The result could make the crowdsource coding marketplace even more usable and popular.

Creating a request for Mechanical Turk isn't overly difficult, but it takes a bit of time editing HTML and answering a lot of questions for which first-time users don't have a lot of context - for example, deciding the qualifications for workers, or whether they need to be "masters" to take on a task.

Amazon is streamlining all that with the Categorization App by making assumptions about what its users would want, providing suggested pricing and helping to create the form that workers will see.

Right now, Amazon is providing an app only for categorization questions. Mechanical Turk offers templates for many more, including image filtering, image tagging, data extraction, data collection and several others. Expect that Amazon will add apps for most of these types of questions in the near future.

Boosting MT Revenues

Obviously, Amazon is trying to streamline the process for creating MT tasks in order to boost its revenue. More tasks means more money. But there's a bit more to it than that.

With the Categorization App, Amazon's assumptions all lead to more money per HIT. Users no longer have to decide what kind of worker to farm tasks out to; rather, Amazon makes that decision, automatically choosing the most expensive (master) workers. To increase accuracy, each HIT will be shown to two users by default, doubling the revenue.

Amazon will also suggest a pay level, to ensure that HITs are "priced attractively" to workers. Requesters can change this, but if a significant number of requesters accept the default pricing, that will probably drive HIT prices up over time.

Better Requests

Another reason that Amazon would want to create an app for MT requests is that a lot of requests are not very good. Amazon is in a position to evaluate the existing requests, and has found them wanting.

One problem? Too many categories. Amazon says that the maximum number of categories that workers can keep in mind is seven to 10. Yet they see requests with more than 150 categories!

The app limits requesters to 10 items. It requires that requesters provide instructions. It's not foolproof, but it provides better odds that requesters will generate reasonable HITs. If requesters want more categories, they need to start from scratch with a custom template.

If you're using Mechanical Turk now, what do you think of the Categorization App? Would you prefer to see Amazon simplify the service further, or is it already well-suited for the kind of crowdsourcing that you're doing?

Illustration titled "Blogging Au Plein Air, Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot" by Flickr user Mike Licht.

Why does founding a startup sometimes feel like the loneliest journey on the planet? Yes, you may be surrounded by family and friends who want to support you emotionally, but do they really understand what you’re going through?

The answer: Find yourself a mentor.

No "Yes Men"

Surrounding yourself with “yes men” is a stupid startup move. Instead, “all” you need to do is find someone who’s “been there, done that,” and is willing to tell you the truth. Don’t scoff. There’s true value having someone you can bounce ideas off of or who can offer a different perspective.

“Why wouldn’t you want to learn from the experience of others?” says Bob Godlasky, a mentor and counselor with SCORE OC in Santa Ana, Calif. SCORE, a nonprofit partner of the Small Business Administration, has more than 13,000 business experts and offers free mentoring and low-cost workshops nationwide. “There’s value in getting nonfamily, nonfriends' points of view. It’s amazing what we can’t see until someone with no particular bias reviews the same picture or the same data,” Godlasky adds.

Janet Crowther and Katie Covington, founders of For the Makers, a website for DIY design and crafts projects, met while designing jewelry for various fashion houses, including Kate Spade, Anthropologie and Marc Jacobs. As first-time entrepreneurs, they had tons of product and design experience, but had never worked in the tech field. “We went everywhere and asked questions of anyone that would listen,” says Covington about the startup of their social community website. “We set out looking for validation of our ideas, but over time found mentors who can help with more specific questions.”

Ask Questions

How do you find the right mentor for your business? “The only way to find mentors is to be out there, meeting people and asking questions,” Covington says. “We’ve met people at events, through friends, on Twitter and by following blogs. As long as you are respectful of time, mentors are almost always willing to help you and your company evolve. We look for mentors who believe in us, have experiences that are vastly differently from ours, and are always creating.”

Crowther and Covington were fortunate to find tech entrepreneur Cindy Gallop (pictured above), founder of the websites If We Ran The World and Make Love Not Porn. “Often the smartest, most interesting people all seem to know each other and are happy to make introductions,” Covington explains. “After talking with Cindy for 10 minutes, she was making parallels between For the Makers and a handful of other people she knew.” The companies don’t have a ton in common, “but both of our companies are about giving people tools to create something for themselves,” Covington says. “Mentors can use their experiences to frame your business in a unique way.”

And don’t worry about the relationship being too formal or structured. Gallop, like her mentees, is a busy entrepreneur. “Sadly, I cannot possibly mentor all the people who approach me asking me to be their mentor,” she says. “I mentor a small number of chosen startups on an ad hoc basis [for] sporadic, intensive hourlong discussions of a particular issue or consultation on a particular situation.”

Gallop’s advice for a great startup-mentor relationship: “Don’t just fall in love with someone’s reputation, perceived celebrity or name. Identify someone who could be directly relevant to what you want to do, or who is pursuing a similar vision. And someone who is likely to have the time and the inclination to help you.”

Slow and Steady Wins

And take it slow. “It’s like any other human relationship,” Gallop explains. “You need to have established a direct personal relationship and rapport with someone before you ask them to take the relationship to another level.”

The best mentor/mentee relationships are ones that are mutually beneficial. My mentee is a Jamaican entrepreneur who launched Study in Jamaica, a successful website that already ranks in the top 250 for traffic in her native county. I always get one or two takeaways from our monthly hourlong conversations. So if you’ve already hit phase two of the startup cycle, consider mentoring those just launching.

This is Part Two of a two-part series on Disassembling Android. 

"Android is open for disruption.” That's what Stewart Putney, CEO of the mobile gaming company Moblyng, said last August. He was talking about the potential for HTML5 Web apps to disrupt the Android Market (now Google Play), but he may have been oddly prophetic. Android has not been riding high in 2012. More than one competitor is lining up to strike a decisive blow.

To truly disrupt Android, other OS makers face an uphill battle. It is no longer 2009, when Android stepped into a mobile market hungry for options beyond the iPhone (then only on AT&T) and the aging BlackBerry and Windows Mobile ecosystems. The market is now well established and the only two players that currently mean anything are iOS and Android.

For the sake of clarity, let’s look at the other contenders (in order of importance):

• Windows Phone: On its way to becoming a solid Number 3 behind iOS and Android.
• BlackBerry 10: Research In Motion’s next BlackBerry operating system and perhaps its last gasp to save the franchise.
• Mozilla B2G: Open, browser-based OS currently in development from Mozilla and the open source community. 
• Tizen: Formerly MeeGo. Has the backing of the Linux Foundation and Intel, and it has caught the eyes of several manufacturers looking for an alternative.
• Linux/Ubuntu: Pure, open Linux-based OS has been kicked about by the open source community, but generally unavailable in devices until 2013 at the earliest.
• webOS: Open-sourced by Hewlett-Packard, may have a legitimate future if developers embrace browser-based mobile interaction.

Microsoft and Nokia would love nothing more than to see Windows Phone eat Android’s market share. In the short term, that is not going to happen. The best Windows Phone, the Lumia 900, available through AT&T, does not measure up well with the best Android phones, either in specifications or user interface. What Windows Phone does have going for it is increasing traction with both carriers and manufacturers tired of dealing with the array of Android devices and the never-ending need to support them. Windows Phone is a known quantity and will continue to rise in market share. It will not reach the levels of Android, but it can shave 5% to 10% of its market share within a couple of years, especially if carriers continue to market and subsidize Windows Phone devices.

The problems for Windows Phone in disrupting Android are the macro-problems that face any OS aiming to usurp the crown. First, the Windows Phone Marketplace is a wasteland of copied and boring apps (with a few exceptional entries). Developer support is critical to the success of a smartphone OS, as developers create the content that drives adoption. The better a developer can fare on a platform, the harder it will work to build a productive ecosystem around it. Windows Phone and BlackBerry do not, at this point, have developer interest equivalent to Android and iOS. With almost 500,000 apps in Google Play (against 70,000 for Windows Phone and BlackBerry), conquering Android is bound to be an uphill battle. 

Manufacturers and carriers may be starting to look at throwing more weight behind Windows Phone. There are a variety of reasons for this. The most important is that Microsoft is willing to pay for visibility, and manufacturers and carriers are happy to take money whether or not Windows Phone actually sells well. 

While Windows Phone appears to be on the rise, Blackberry is still in wait-and-see mode. What will BlackBerry 10 ultimately look like? Will it be sexy enough to not only compete with the current crop of Android phones but remain viable for two or three years? To take market share back from Android, RIM needs to focus as much on what it releases this year as what that platform will look like in 2014. 

Tizen occupies an interesting space in this ecosystem. It has indirect backing from Samsung and could easily add HTC to the list of supporters if manufacturer relations turn sour with Google over its Motorola acquisition. Tizen will continue to be pushed by Intel - but the fact is that there may be little hope for it. It does not have the industry clout to disrupt Android in the short or long term. A wild card: Tizen has been seen running Android apps, a development that could give it traction.

What applies for Tizen also applies for webOS. These open source projects will likely produce nominal results and devices, at best. 

That leaves the two most intriguing candidates – Ubuntu and Mozilla. These are also open source projects, but they have significant developer communities behind them. Canonical has proposed an Ubuntu mobile operating system that has potential to step right into Android's position. One can imagine that an Ubuntu mobile OS would be very similar to Android (both with a Linux kernel) but not tied to Google. That would please Google’s manufacturer and service partners that would love to be free of Google’s regulations about how a device must behave to be allowed access to Google Play. 

Mozilla's Boot2Gecko Mockups

Mozilla is in a different category. It is an operating system that is of the browser, by the browser. In that way, it's similar to Google’s Chrome operating system, though B2G would be specialized toward mobile devices rather than notebooks. This is where HTML5 could truly disrupt Android, as it would run through the mobile Web and not be restricted by… anything. The trick for Mozilla is to create a browser-based operating system that has all of the device capabilities that Android, iOS, BlackBerry and Windows Phone have with native APIs and hardware acceleration. That is not something the HTML5 environment does currently (at least, not well) and will be the biggest challenge for Mozilla as it develops the OS. Right now, Mozilla’s problems are technical in nature. Get the OS right first and then we can start talking about how it deals with manufacturers, carriers, developers, marketers, advertisers and the rest of the mobile ecosystem. Of all the methods and technologies used by would-be Android competitors, HTML5 has the highest ceiling. The company that pulls together a browser-based mobile operating system could fare very well, especially with developers. 

Taken individually, each would-be Android killer has strengths and flaws that will help and hinder it in trying to unseat Google. The near-term players (Windows Phone and BlackBerry) will have to battle OEMs and manufacturers and curry favor with developers. Everybody else still has to work out development and technical issues before they can gain the kind of traction that Android has created. 

Consequently, for the next two years or so, the mobile world will likely be a race between Apple and Google. 2012 will not be the Year Of Something Other Than Android. 2015 and beyond? Perhaps. 

What do you think has the greatest potential to disrupt Android? Let’s hear your picks in the comments.