Posts on June 30, 2010

Palm: money to burn?
Mood: thoughtful
Posted on 2010-06-30 10:49:00
Tags: essay palmpre
Words: 229

Since the HP acquisition of Palm is expected to close this week, Palm has been spending money on their platform like crazy. To wit:

- On June 17, they announced all apps in the App Catalog would be 50% off until July 9, and they'd reimburse the difference to developers. So instead of making money on every app sale, they're paying the developer for each sale.

- Monday, Palm extended the 50% sale until July 23.

- From the beginning, the policy has been that each app in the catalog (unless it was open source) had a $50 submission fee. Yesterday they announced that not only are they getting rid of that fee, they're refunding all the $50 fees they've collected in the past, which is pretty ridiculously generous.

One could argue that these are nothing particularly new - Palm's been courting developers pretty heavily from the beginning, what with making homebrew very easy to do (no rooting required!) and giving away $1 million in their Hot Apps competition (of which I'm hoping to collect some), and having another Hot Apps competition starting in July for PDK apps. But the timing of these last three moves, plus the fact that they're insanely generous, make me think that they're related to the acquisition. I assume that HP was on board with these moves - if so, it bodes very well for the future of webOS!

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world cup links
Mood: happy
Posted on 2010-06-30 13:17:00
Tags: soccer links
Words: 292

Totally unrelated: happy 10 year anniversary to my wonderful husband!

Sadly, today is the first day since the start of the World Cup with no games. So, to pass the time:

- A cool visualization of which World Cup players play in which leagues - there's a lot more cross-pollination these days, with the English, German, Italian, and Spanish leagues benefiting the most.

- Why Lionel Messi is so awesome. Go Argentina!

Another fun soccer story:

In the 1994 Shell Caribbean Cup, Barbados and Grenada were playing their final group game, with Grenada ahead by 3 goal differential, so Barbados needed to win by 2 to advance. This tournament was played under weird rules, including the fact that no games were allowed to end in draws, and if the game was a draw after 90 minutes, it would go to sudden death extra time, with the winning goal counting double.

Barbados was up 2-0 until Grenada scored to make it 2-1 in the 83rd minute. Since Barbados needed to win by 2, and Grenada was playing very heavy defense, Barbados instead deliberately scored an own goal to tie it 2-2. That way, if they could manage to win in extra time, they would get the win by 2 they needed. (since the winning goal would count double)

It didn't take long for Grenada to figure out what was going on, and so they tried to score an own goal to put Barbados back ahead by 1. But Barbados was planning on this, and started defending both goals while Grenada tried to score on either one.

Amusingly enough, Barbados was successful in preventing Grenada from scoring, and it went into extra time where Barbados did in fact win! Here's a Snopes article about the whole thing.

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