I wonder though: in these situations if he were to refuse the acquisition would Apple just steal his idea (NOT implementation) and bake it into the iPhone regardless? I think Microsoft did something like this, no? Any thoughts?
Apple has certainly done this before:
Apple Literally Stole My Thunder https://medium.com/wwdc-round-up/253aed27a455
Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/06/08/apple_copies_rejecte...
Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC http://www.macworld.com/article/1035200/konfabulator.html
Apple stole Karelia Watson http://forums.macworld.com/index.php?/topic/2477-apples-stol...
The article states "I’m not naive enough to claim Apple actually took my idea." You apparently are, though.
> Apple rips off student's rejected iPhone app - iOS 5 lifts idea, name, even logo
C'mon. "Wi-Fi Sync" is hardly a surprising name for such a feature, and making its logo the bog-standard Wifi logo with a bog-standard Sync logo superimposed is hardly a surprising choice either. It was a long-expected and long-awaited feature.
> Konfabulator, Dashboard controversy flows out of WWDC
A controversy about the bog-standard term "widget".
> Apple stole Karelia Watson
Well, it made its own version and named it cheekily. This seems to be the one mostly valid case in your post.
It was a different time when the images/weather app was rejected by Apple. They were deliberately trying to prevent people creating thin wrappers around websites and calling it an app. And at the start it made a lot of sense.
Syncing over WiFi was a feature that users had demanded long before that app had been around and the name/logo are not distinctive. They are the most common sense choices you would use.
And widgets existed decades before Konfabulator thought to bring them to OSX. They were available as Desk Accessories in the previous versions of Mac OS as well as on Windows/Linux.
http://techcrunch.com/2010/01/27/think-ibooks-looks-familiar...
And Apple has over a hundred billion dollars in cash and eighty thousand employees. They could certainly clone this software if they wanted to.
The reason to acquire is to signal to other people that doing innovative things on apple platforms can make you a millionaire, instead of signalling the same thing is a sucker's game as apple will steal your ideas if they're any good.
I think the App was more about the implementation than the idea. He created extremely efficient implementation of jpeg compression with 50000 lines of C++ code as far as I remember from the dev's blog. So Apple is obviously more interested in the guy than anything else.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stac_Electronics#Microsoft_laws...
Look at SnapChat turning down $3bn from Facebook and now FB integrating a lot of that functionality into Instagram.
If Facebook acquired this then the technology would be accessible to a far greater audience than just the users of Apple products.
Seems to me that we should want advances in technology (software or hardware) to benefit the greatest number of users possible, and with Apple owning this it now restricts this method to only those who use Apple products.
Oh, just noticed your username.
Edit: Being downvoted? Do I have to do the defensive thing of pointing out I own Apple products too?
I'm unclear why we are arguing whether this technology is somehow better off in the hands of one monopolistic, predatory giant instead of the other monopolistic, predatory giant.
The way to make this technology truly accessible to a far greater audience is to make it open. Everything else is quibbling over which King has the softer boot on the neck :-)
If Google or Samsung thinks it matters to their users, they've got more than enough $$$ to fund something for Android specifically.
Except for those with a phone older than the 5S, who now can't use this feature anymore because Apple wants to sell them a new phone.
http://www.amazon.com/JPEG-Compression-Standard-Multimedia-S...
My memory is a bit fuzzy here, but from what I recall, a friend tried implementing JPEG compression on a parallel system (back in the mid 90s). One of the trouble spots was the reliance on the relationship between blocks regarding prediction of the DC coefficient.
One startup I worked at, we had an entropy encoding method that could add 20-30% additional compression just by recording coefficients. Patent here -- http://www.google.com/patents/US6236762
I understood he first optimized the algorithm, then tuned it to be even faster on ARM?
So there's a lot of room in optimising the process
https://web.archive.org/web/20131010012005/http://www.snappy...
I wonder why they took it down.
Middle path, present focused, to an extreme, enforced on you whether you want it or not :)
What I'd like to add that, it apparently SnappyCam would only make sense on iPhone 5 or lower. That is because iPhone 5S already can do what SnappyCam does in its native Cam app by holding down the shoot button. Perhaps Apple got other ideas for its use in the future.
"but also the UI is well thought" -> "but also the UI is well thought out"
pap andria polous
Wow! I had no idea! That's very cool. I was also very impressed with the 5S's slo-mo capture. It's exceptional quality for 120fps.
> I have a feeling that soon SnappyLabs is going to have Apple knocking on their door with a very nice offer.
I say this as someone who was contacted by a VC firm recently. They were interested in investing, but their assumption was that we wanted to grow and "exit". When I asked for clarification on what "exit" meant, I was told that it means to sell the company. I was confused as to why someone would want to sell something they spent so many years creating.
(That said, I think in this case their tech will genuinely improve Apple's software. And maybe they get to continue doing passionate work at Apple. It just feels like they are no longer in control.)
I would certainly call that congratulatory worthy.
No doubt Apple put a very lucrative offer on the table, but another route could have been for the author to dual-license the code - GPL it so the community benefits, while any improvements he can then push out in his app which he continues to sell.
