Wow, this must have taken a long time to put together. I think he makes a very fine point when he says browsers must have a part to play in fixing this.
But any such app is just an UI for presenting the data available for everyone. What if this app is just a open source UI with instructions on how to fit your own API key ? Finding and penalizing such apps would serve nothing.
The only solution to this is awareness on the users part and nothing else.
This is just an example of how not to do an April fools day joke. These guys are posting the feedback they collected back to their server which I think is immoral.
Yes it wont be able to read it. But that's not what they are after. What they do want is to execute some user action on the server side. So this action would have taken place just by executing the GET/POST request.
"Unfortunately for Samsung while elements of the iPad design shows up the Galaxy pad is a lot closer to the iPad than any of the other designs. For design patents to be meaningful they must prevent such overt imitation and force competitors to do more than copy good design."
I don't think that would matter if the design it self is generic - not an innovation (as in this case) and hence the patent it self can be considered as invalid.
"they don't 'force it on you' by the way, as you can easily use C or C++ for anything except interfacing with Obj-C frameworks"
Unfortunately, since most of the popularity is due to iOS applications - developers have to touch these frameworks at one point or another and that means touching at least a tiny bit of ObjC
Considering that most startups fail for reasons other than technical (running out of money, lack of traction, founders moving on) I don't think any correlation will be that meaningful. It will be interesting see a plot of the type of the startup (social, b2b, retail etc) versus the stack though :)