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I don’t normally write about non technical issues but today Apple released their 2010 Supplier Responsibility Process Report.  As someone who had an office in India for about 5 years, this is an issue that is dear to my heart.   Most of us have accepted that businesses need to have some of the work done overseas for cost/competitive reasons.  But we also assume that when we buy from a reputable company, that the workers who created the product are treated fairly and the materials in the product are safe.  Well, most often the factory making the product is not owned or run by the brand and rarely do brands put a lot of effort into monitoring working conditions at the factory.

What brands are vigilant about is the cost and the quality. These are things that consumer can directly see (and affect the company’s bottom line). If you want to see how important this issue is to a brand that you buy from, go to their corporate website and see if you can find something regarding this. Most times, you will not find any mention of what standards their hold their suppliers to. In some cases, there will be a brief mention of some standards but nothing about what they are doing to ensure that these standards are being followed. During my time in Asia, I’ve seen all sorts of things and I can tell you compliance is a big problem. I’m not saying that most factories take advantage of workers or have unsafe work conditions but there is a huge variation in what is happening.  And a lot of times, Western brands are (partially) turning a blind eye. The only way to really make sure things are done properly is to have a full time presence at the factory. The good news is that there are some companies that are doing this. With a local presence, it’s a lot harder for a factory owner to hide any dirty practices. 

So I’m very happy to see that Apple is openly talking about what they demand of their suppliers and also equally important, what they are doing to ensure compliance.  There is no doubt Apple is not perfect.  But at least we have visibility at to what they are doing. We should really expect this of all the major companies doing business in the developing world. If you have a moment, go to the website of your favorite brand(s) and see if they have something on the site regarding this.

And now back to our regularly scheduled (tech) broadcast….

On the weekend, a new version of jQuery was relesed (1.4.2).  What was already a good library has been optimized and runs even faster.  Those that make heavy use of the library might want to try and upgrade.  And obviously, any new projects should start with the latest version.

http://ajaxian.com/archives/jquery-1-4-2-performance-and-a-few-apis

If you are currently using the 1.3.x version and want to know what’s changed in 1.4.x
http://jquery14.com/day-01/jquery-14

While reading a blog post about Netflix this morning, there was a link to a presentation describing the company’s values.  Now lots of companies have something like this and normally its pretty cookie cutter.  But if you have a minute, check it out Netflix’s as its quite different.  And refreshing.

A few key take aways…

• Its not the espresso machine or free food that attracts smart people.  It’s that chance to work with other smart people.  Sometimes startups spend a lot of time talking about the little perks that they have. Sure they are nice but they really aren’t what attracts or keep good staff.
• Pay people what they are worth.  While this makes sense a lot of places I worked had competitive salaries when they hired but then just used a simple single digit increment for the yearly increase, no matter how much the staff member had grown their skills.  This forces staff to leave the company to make big moves up the salary curve.
• They have a very simple test to decide if a staff member should be kept on or not: “which people, if they told me they were leaving in two months, for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep”.  Everyone else should get a generous severance package.
• As a company grows, there is a tendency to add more procedures and rules.  Unfortunately, this destroys the environment that your star employees joined for.

There are more nuggets in the presentation.  I suggest you give it a read yourself.

What Amazon’s one-click checkout and Apple’s iTunes store have proven is that by removing the friction from the payment process, sales will dramatically increase. In fact, in the case of iTunes, it was the magical key to getting people to pay for music and for mobile apps.  So it was significant yesterday when Facebook announced that they would start to accepting Paypal, especially since they’ve indicated that 70% of their users are outside of the US. But what is a bigger story is that very few Facebook apps are yet able to use their credit system.  The system is still officially in beta and only a short-list of apps are included.

So while its great to see Facebook continuing to improve their payment system, what the larger Facebook development community needs is to have Facebook hurry up and finish the long drawn out beta that they have had for Facebook credits.  All is not gloomy though.  In 2010, social gaming is estimated to be a $1.3B business and in Asia it’s already a $7B business (http://www.slideshare.net/plus8star/social-networkings). But transacting payments with users is easier for the big companies like Zynga.  The bigest beneficiary of Facebook opening up their payment system, will be all the smaller developers, of which there are many.

Still, hats off to Facebook for now working with Paypal. I’m holding my breath that they are hard at work at finishing up the beta for their credits system so that all their application partners can benefit.

UPDATED: Looks like Facebook is suggesting Credits might come out of beta fairly soon. http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=364

There has been some buzz yesterday about 24 of the worlds mobile phone carriers announcing that they will create their own app store (Wholesale Applications Community). We’ve known for a while that they are upset about being cut out of the revenue from app stores. My daughter as an example spends $20/month on iTunes. I know others who do the same. The phone companies definitely want to find a way to get in on the game.

Here is the announcement….

http://www.mobilebusinessbriefing.com/article/mobile-operators-unite-on-global-apps-platform-

Now, the 1st question that I had was how would this fit in with my iphone which already has an app store (and a very good one I might add)? Will I have two app stores? The same can be said for anyone with a high end phone from Nokia, Microsoft, RIM or Palm.

If you look at the API used to create apps for this new app store, they are based on the BONDI APIs (http://bondi.omtp.org/). Apps are more like HTML widgets that can access the phone features (like GPS and address book, etc). Now to be really cross-platform means that we are talking about lowest common denominator so this is not HTML 5. In fact, the current engine (on the BONDI site) runs on Windows Mobile.

And this leads me to where I believe this app store will initially exist… on low-end feature phones. Sure it might be possible to run one of these apps on an iphone but why would I when there is probably a native app that is much better. This begs the question as to why the carriers want to have an app store for feature phones. The first part of that is that its the only game in town left. Here in North American that doesn’t look very exciting but in Asia its common for feature phones to have apps. And the carriers charge for them. In India, I saw feature phones where you could get your horoscope for 2Rs ($0.08) or check the cricket scores. And in India feature phones still rules as most people can’t afford a $600 for a (unsubsidized) phone when they make $300 a year. And remember India is a country with 350M mobile phones (and growing quickly).

And the second reason that the mobile carriers might want to do this is that eventually, HTML 5 will allow apps to be created that are as rich as native apps. At that time, a carrier app store might be able to take on a handset app store. As a developer, I would love to create one app that works on more than one type of handset.

So unless you have the ability to sell your apps in Asia (or Africa, etc), today’s announcement is not something that an app developer need to rush out and play with. But we should keep an eye on it. If the carriers don’t mess this app store up and HTML 5 does turn out to be what we hope it will be, maybe we’ll be very happy to develop for it in the future.