Perhaps prediction is the wrong word, but at least I should point out my “suggestion” a few blog posts back about HP making webOS open source. I think @MegWhitman has been reading my blog posts!

It’s hard to believe that it’s already been two years since I started working full-time for Toura. Man, have we come a long way in a short period of time. It seems like 10 years smashed into the space of two, but what a fun and incredible experience it has been. I’ve always wanted to work for a start-up and I’m finally living that dream.

Today at Toura, we kicked off the new year by having an all day strategy session. We covered various topics and set our objectives for 2012. I think everyone on the team agreed it was a productive session with a lot of exciting things going on across the company. Most notably, we spent a significant amount of time covering our product roadmap for Mulberry, our open source HTML5 framework and Mobile App Producer, our publisher solution now being used by major news organizations, magazine publishers and cultural institutions around the world.

Earlier today we announced that we are partnering with Radio One to help them distribute their content and increase the reach of their advertisers on mobile devices. Radio One is one of the largest radio station groups in the country, with 54 stations in 16 markets, specifically targeting the African-American community. The company has a fascinating history, having been started by Cathy Hughes in 1979, when she bought an AM radio station, and is now run by her son, CEO, Alfred Liggins. They have an extraordinary management team, with President Barry Mayo running the stations and GM Dan Shelley running their digital business that regularly outperforms their competition.

I got a chance to spend the better part of the morning yesterday with one of our lead javascript developers, Rebecca Murphey. It’s exciting to hear about what Rebecca’s been working on with the rest of our dev team, an open source project you may have heard about called Mulberry.

It’s been about six weeks since we announced our plans to release Mulberry, a set of application development tools we’ve been working on for more than a year. A lot has happened in those six weeks: we transformed tens of thousands of lines of code into something we were ready for the world to see, arrived at a very permissive license for the code, and started sharing Mulberry with a handful of developers to get their feedback ahead of an official release.

This morning I read an article in today’s FT about Meg Whitman’s move to overturn her predecessor’s decision to spin off HP’s PC arm. Apparently, it’s been well received by the board as it received unanimous vote.

The title of this post is a quote attributed to Andy Warhol. It would be very interesting to see what Andy Warhol would think of our star-obsessed, reality television culture of the present and perhaps even more interesting to think of the role he might have played in it. Would he have had his own reality channel on Bravo giving “stars” their 15 minutes of fame? Given the arc of his career, he likely would have utilized the new media forms in ways that we have not yet conceived of and had miles, not inches, written about it.

I woke up this morning in London to my alarm going off on my iPhone. I then proceeded to do what I usually do every morning and check my iPhone for emails. Usually, I check out my news apps, the NY Times or FT. This morning I went to Tweetdeck and that’s where I learned about the death of Steve Jobs.

If you live in California or are part of the museum world, you’ve no doubt heard of the large scale art initiative called Pacific Standard Time happening in Southern California. Led by the Getty, the initiative is a region-wide collaborative of museums and galleries, described as:

“an unprecedented collaboration of cultural institutions across Southern California coming together to celebrate the birth of the L.A. art scene. Beginning October 2011, over 60 cultural institutions will make their contributions to this region-wide initiative encompassing every major L.A. art movement from 1945 to 1980.”

Late last week, we announced a deal with Dennis Publishing to provide the Toura platform for the production of at least 20 applications to be launched across devices running iOS and Android. The first of these, Auto Express, was published last week.

The strategy of Dennis to publish many apps, and that of publishers in general moving forward, points to the numerous challenges and opportunities of mobile content distribution.

At Toura, we’ve been working for nearly two years on what it means to create content-rich mobile applications. Over the course of that time, we’ve developed two powerful tools: a web-based system for arranging content, media, and data into a compelling experience; and a content publishing system that turns the output of that system into a responsive, native mobile application using HTML5 technologies.

You’ve spent a great amount of time building an app, thinking through what will make it good and useful. It’s finally time to release it. It gets submitted, goes through the review process (in the case of Apple), and finally goes live. You may think that your work is over, but it doesn’t end there.

While most of the hype surrounding HTML5 has been around new tags like <video> and <canvas>, there are a lot of less dramatic enhancements available in the latest browsers that can help developers solve common problems more simply and elegantly than had been previously possible. (I’m using the term HTML5 in its buzzword sense — not the literal sense — so this includes other web technologies such as CSS3.) Some of these smaller improvements, while not nearly as cool as <video> or <canvas>, can have more effect on the day-to-day problems of web developers than those more popular Flash-killing tags.

It’s predicted that >50% of digital content will be consumed over mobile devices by 2012. That’s incredible growth, reminiscent of the early days of the Internet and personal computing. And that’s the kind of new channel opportunity that comes around maybe once in a decade, even in this age of lightning-fast technology advances.

When we overhauled the system that we use to deliver content on devices, one decision we made was to favor HTML5 and CSS3 over “native” components wherever possible. Native components have their benefits — they tend to have better performance than an HTML5 counterpart — but there’s an enormous tradeoff for that performance: a component that works on iOS absolutely will not work on Android or another operating system. Going native means duplication of effort, both in development and maintenance. It also means that expanding to any new platform requires developing a new native component.

This past week, Apple announced a price increase to the various pricing tiers in the app store. As you can only imagine, consumers in affected countries are not happy about this change.

Here at Toura, we’ve been talking a long time about writing a blog. I’m proud to say we’ve finally gotten around to it and I’m happy to be the first entry.