The Startup Bootcamp in Dublin has ended and they had a great day to pitch their products to would-be investors.

A full line-up of who pitched what is available on silicon republic.

Best of luck to all the companies who participated, and best of luck to all those inspired by the project to go on and develop their own businesses.

Instagram’s simplicity overshadows the fact that it always feels fast (hence, responsive) and natural to use. Now we know why…

There are 3 simple “white lies” behind the service, including the much-heralded point at which Instagram uploads images.

Fast Company have an excellent run-down of how it works, even when it’s not working. White lies are not necessarily good for all services & apps, but Instagram gives the impression of solidity even when there is none. Lessons that might be worth $1bn for Facebook…

“Mac OS 10.9 Ocelot” sounds pretty cool.

Google is said to be planning to compete with Apple’s own Safari by releasing a version of its Chrome Web browser for iOS devices.

The launch of Chrome for iOS on the App Store could be as soon as this quarter, according to Macquarie Equities Research (via GigaOm). Its debut is seen as igniting a modern browser war on mobile devices, similar to the “Browser Wars” of the late 1990s between Internet Explorer and Netscape.

All third-party browsers for iOS must be based on WebKit, Apple’s open source browser engine. The existing versions of Google Chrome, available for Mac, Windows and Android, are already based on the WebKit layout engine.

Sounds great. I quite love the desktop version, and it’s been my default browser for quite a long time. In fact, since Mac launch, Chrome has been my preferred web browser. It’s one of the only examples of Google doing UI perfectly right from the offset. So seeing it on iOS could be great, and could force more innovation from Apple’s Safari team.

(via appleinsider)

Mind-boggling figures aside, the question on many minds is this: Is Mr. Zuckerberg really ready for this? Is he — there’s no sugarcoating it — grown up enough to lead a public corporation that is more valuable than McDonald’s or Goldman Sachs?

This is a question that keeps coming from those watching the IPO roadshow. They keep forgetting, though, that this is a product of his own – and his (our) generation. His staff are undoubtedly entirely hoodied, jeans wearing code hackers like me and my friends.

The value of the company doesn’t matter to my generation as long as individually, everyone is happy. Happiness outside of work means that you can focus on the product you want to make. It’s different thinking to the McDonalds or Goldman Sachs boardrooms. And everyone seems to be forgetting that.

Whatever you think of Facebook Inc. and the IPO roadshow, I would have no doubt that Zuckerberg has his vision and is surrounded by “his kind of people”. This is why he has Sheryl Sandberg; to be the ying to his yang. She’s the suit, he’s the coder guy. If he wasn’t so wealthy you could see him helping to organise a Palo Alto coder dojo.

There’s a lot wrong with Facebook (e.g. more users in the US use the mobile site rather than the big one, yet their app sucks) but there’s a lot more right with it. That’s why they’re on this roadshow. Give Zuck his dues. And give my generation (generation hoodie) our dues. We’re killing the suits, one bit of hackery at a time.

(via nytimes)

Today Google released a huge update to their Google+ app for iOS. Yes, iOS only. Not Android.

It’s absolutely remarkable. A beautifully designed, thought-out and functional app from Google that pitches their social network right at mobile. Properly.

This app makes sense, focuses on what a 3.5-inch screen is capable of and makes sense of any “noise” G+ (or any social network) generates.

Probably just as important to Google, though, is the fact that it leaves the Facebook app in the dust.

VP of industrial design for HP, Stacy Wolff:

I would go back to the TC1000 [Tablet PC] from about 10 years, and that’s a tablet. I think if you look at the new Spectre XT, there are similarities in a way, not due to Apple but due to the way technologies developed. Apple may like to think that they own silver, but they don’t. In no way did HP try to mimic Apple. In life there are a lot of similarities. [...] it’s a struggle as we drive to simplicity

There’s a lot of misdirection in all of the quotes from this guy. This new HP netbook, which looks disgracefully like an Apple product, takes far too many cues from Apple’s current product industrial design (which is now nearly 4 years old, remember) to call it a coincidence of consciousness. Which is Wolff’s argument in a nutshell.

Both HP and Apple are striving for simplicity, but did HP not think “gee, this looks like a Mac, let’s do simple in our own way”? I find it hard to believe that no one in HP thought that by simply adding a rubber bottom, brushed metal look and by using magnesium instead of aluminium they thought that no one would draw a comparison to a Mac.

Even the placement of the shiny silver HP icon in the middle of the bottom screen ridge (which is black like a Mac) is exactly where Macs have said what they are for years. I’m staring at one that says “MacBook Pro” right now. The speaker layout and even the “gesturepad” are so eerily similar that there is no way an industrial design lead could pass this off as original.

If this product was submitted as a college project it would be failed for plagiarism.

Stacy goes on to mention that HP were the ones to introduce “island style keyboards”, “chiclet keys”, “wedge design” and so on…

If the struggle for simplicity leads everyone to the same apex, then how is it that in 2008 the best, simplest and most appealing design was completely revised by Apple? How did HP not do this back then if they’re so innovative? The design stinks of Samsung tablet design. Make it look like the market leader and confuse people into sales. They want people to think this laptop is a cheaper Mac – not a glorious stand-alone product.

This idea for “simple design” making everything look the same is insane. Take two razor blades by two competing manufacturers. They do not look the same, and yet they use remarkably similar designs (and often the same materials, etc.). HP is fighting a losing battle in the same way Samsung are. And the problem for both is Apple’s invent-iterate-repeat philosophy to design will kill both of them. Even if HP go to court over stealing this design, it won’t matter, because Apple are likely to have changed their designs before HP managed to get any market share back.

Apparently the folks over at cultofmac have a source that has seen the elusive “Apple TV”. No, not the small hockey-puck sized device that’s on the market. The fully fledged television set.

We have a source who claims to have seen a prototype Apple high-definition television set in action, indicating that Apple is readying the long-awaited device for market.

The claims are very average. In fact nothing remarkable is revealed here. It’s got everything you would imagine an Apple TV would have; Siri, iOS-esque system, AirPlay and it looks like the current cinema display models.

Interestingly the article goes on to say that their source might not be 100% perfect with predictions, simply because their source often see’s prototype models.

Our source is well-placed and has provided us with great tips in the past. However, not all of them have panned out, ostensibly due to the fact that our source tends to see products in the prototype or early development stage and Apple doesn’t always ultimately choose to release them. We hope this is one of our source’s tips about an upcoming Apple product that actually sees market.

It looks interesting, if not a little bland. As an article it’s a good, exciting read. How long we’ll have to wait for this is anyones guess. WWDC is likely to be reserved for iOS6 and possibly the new Mac range featuring the new Intel chips. If I were a betting man I would say this would be in the September pipe-line. Why? Because that’s the traditional timeframe for new iOS devices to be launched now (though that could change on a whim) and if Apple are releasing such a large consumer product, Christmas is the market they would need to hit. Especially given that is their first financial quarter of the year.

Alexis Ohanian, one of the co-founders of reddit did a TV interview and mentioned Facebook’s support for CISPA, a new US bill that runs along the same lines as SOPA, with new provisions.

The primary concern is that it’s unfair for Facebook, who have so much information on users, to support a bill that allows access to that data from governments should they request it.

Ohanian and Reddit were among the leaders in the successful Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) protest. Facebook’s efforts, on the other hand, were largely confined to an anti-SOPA status update Zuckerberg posted on his wall.

I imagine new campaigns similar to the anti-SOPA ones will crop up, but it would be a huge gesture of good-will to the Internet community that built Facebook for Zuckerberg to come out and publicly renounce the support Facebook have of CISPA.

(via dailydot.com)

The folks over at Xamarin have posed a remarkably interesting idea; what if Android was coded in C#?

They claim serious battery and performance gains over the current state of affairs. Moreover, having Android on any platform other than Java means Google might avoid a $1 billion bill from Oracle.

Android’s core codebase contains over a million lines of Java code, and we knew we wanted to be able to stay up to date with new releases of Android — in fact, we started with the Android 2.x source code back in 2011, and then upgraded XobotOS to Android 4.0 when Google open sourced Ice Cream Sandwich earlier this year. So for us, the only reasonable option was to do a machine translation of Java to C#, building and maintaining any necessary tools along the way.

The tool we used as a starting point is called Sharpen. Sharpen is famous for helping people such as Frank Krueger port a Java applet to an award-winning iPad app in two months.

This is either pure genius, or utterly nuts and a waste of resources for their company. Either way, I imagine it’ll be hard for Google to ignore this.