I installed yesterday pCalc on my iPad and was quite amazed by the way the developer invented a really innovative business model of freemium … for a simple calculator.

As any freemium model, the basic calculator is free and high-quality and the developer identified a few typologies of users that need special functions such as HEX/Binary handling, RPN with multi-lines… and all those features can be purchased in-app in a super smooth way.

It’s jus brilliant to see that something as simple as a calculator can be a field of innovation like this.

That’s the breaking news of the day. While they managed to stage their comeback at CES last year, Palm piled up bad choices preventing them to actually get healthy again, one being to get stuck with Sprint wich a CDMA-only version of their phones for over 1 year. they only now managed to release a GSM version of their Palm Pre and Pixi and are struggling with distribution, for instance in France you can buy int through SFR but only online (no retail presence) and the only place you can touch one is the lobby at SFR HQ (picture on the left).

HP invented the iPaq, the first really amazing windows-mobile based PDA in the early 2000 which were instrumental in the decline of Palm and triggered a couple of big reorganizations such as the split between Palm One and Palm Source (hard/soft) and eventually lead to the abandon of PalmOS.

But HP did not understand the move from the PDA to the Smartphone and every experience they did in that area ended up as a catastrophy.

HP buying Palm at such a high valuation  means they want to get back in the Smartphoen business and want to get rid of Windows Mobile as their reference platform (which has obviously been a burden over the last couple of years). I still feel the valuation is very high since they’re buying an OS that was built in about 1 year, some experience in the field of capacitive sensors and a pile of patents.

Here’s the official press release.

Got a new oliv tree on the terrace – but the lousy delivery men broke in half one of the main branches – thus extreme fixing surgery required (well not so extreme apart from the running at the plant store get the repair kit).

I’ll save you the usual unboxing video – it’s as usual a perfectly packaged product, you wouldn’t expect less from Apple anyhow. I’ve been quite unsettled on the iPad from the start. It’s heavy, and there is no clear use case or killer apps yet on it. Nevertheless, I can feel something in the air, and needed to give it a first shot.

OK, web browsing is nice but this can’t be the killer app, especially since quite a lot of interactive site do not render properly on the iPad (wanted to book a hotel, and failed). The big screen size really enable a better use of the applciations, especially when those are redesigned for it, such as Evernote which is a real beauty to fire up and play with.

The eBook side is disappointing, the screen being highly reflective makes it really uncomfortable to use and at the end when it comes to reading text, my eBook (Sony PRS505) does a much better job. But where the iPad really blows mind is when it comes to displaying unstructured data such as comics or newspaper. The Marvel and Le Monde applications are simply mindblowing, and are truly reinventing their medium through the iPad, while keeping the paper experience present, they manage to fullty take advantage of the device to enhance the end-user experience. In the case of le monde for instance, I always found the reading of the pdf version on the PC lousy, and would stick to the full text articles instead, while the iPad app managed to bring those two worlds together again.

I expect the gaming to be something huge also, since the big screen will be very prone to social interactions around the device, yet I did not get a epiphany on this topic while trying out a few games.

I’ve been quite involved with Streamezzo since its creation. First, we were at the same incubator at Telecom Paris, then Kamayo which I co-founded based his work on STZ’s engine and got eventually acquired by STZ, and I had the chance to keep close bounds with the company.

Innovacom invested last year in Streamezzo and reboosted the company so well that it just got acquired by AMDOCS. While I don’t know the details of the deals, one can only guess that such a quick turn-around means a good deal for Innovacom and for the founders (who are known to be treated respectfully by Innovacom).

The technology will certainly become a part of AMDOCS’ CES portfolio offering to Telcos worldwide. As usual when it comes to operators technology, 100% of user-base support is compulsory and Streamezzo has been the only one to reach that level yet.

Congrats again on the deal !

We had a little talk that had me gather a few interesting figures about MMOs:

World of Warcraft stats:

• Blizzard Online Network Services run in 10 data centers around the world, including facilities in Washington, California, Texas, Massachusetts, France, Germany, Sweden, South Korea, China, and Taiwan.
• Blizzard uses 20,000 systems and 1.3 petabytes of storage to power its gaming operations.
• WoW’s infrastructure includes 3,250 server blades, 75,000 CPU cores, and 112.5 terabytes of blade RAM.
• The Blizzard network is managed by a staff of 68 people.
• The company’s gaming infrastructure is monitored from a global network operating center (GNOC), which like many NOCs, features televisions tuned to the weather stations to track potential uptime threats across its data center footprint.