"Flowr is pitched squarely at small-to-medium businesses, and the pricing reflects that. It’s free for a basic account, which allows up to five users. Premium accounts, with a range of additional features, cost $59 per month for up to 15 users (additional users are $3 per month)."
The growth over the next decade in Enterprise collaboration is going to be around SMEs that today are using email as their only tool. Microsoft is going after this area with Office 365 but when you look at an app product like Flowr you see that a company can get moving with most of the same features from the Cloud for a fraction of the investment.
The app economy has blown the rough off development making faster innovation at lower cost and opening the pie to more smaller players. Will Microsoft be able to respond in time, well that will be very interesting.
Okay yesterday we talked about noosphere, today we are posting a short talk from the king of drug induced mysticism himself Terence McKenna. Are we crack pots?
Well this is a unusually lucid and almost materialistic presentation by McKenna, and we would suggest some of the wilder New Age ideas of the past century can provide means of thinking about the current changes in human culture facilitated by mobile Internet.
The key question to ask is if McKenna's ideas sound familiar today because reality has come out as he predicted and is developing along the lines of ever rapid development, or because our culture has created a myth of such development. Certainly mobile computing and the Internet are evolving faster than anyone could have imagined, but the same can not be said for genomics, cancer treatment, space flight, or green energy.
Its important to keep in mind that part of the entire selling pitch of mobile technology is this kind of rapid evolution towards some kind of singularity. But in the end Web 3.0 devices are just mobile phones that go online. What we do with this simple concept is up to us as a civilization.
The new version of Windows is aims at more mobile platform. Thing is they seem to be embracing the as yet unproven Windows 7 Mobile interface. The OS will potentially free Microsoft from the desktop and take on Google's Android and Mac iOS domination of the mobile computing world. Or it might get people to see that mobile can be extended to the PC and open the door to Android slates and Android PCs.
Microsoft is trying to put a positive spin on this, but it is hard to escape the conclusion that this is a move Microsoft was forced to take. They will be changing the core look and feel of their flagship product. They will be making it look more like their mobile product. And their mobile product is getting killed in the market.
The concept of a mobile Windows is cool, and Windows 8 is just more proof that Web 3.0 will be the mobile web. But Microsoft is going to play a game it has not played for a long time: second place.
(Personally we find the layout of the Windows Mobile phone too restrictive. The squares impose a certain pattern of presentation on you, all heavily branded by Microsoft. The entire joy of Androids is the fact it is a light weight OS with the apps you select arranged the way you want them arranged. We have a bad feeling about this one.)
