“Real time” and “cloud” have somehow become synonyms for “sexy.” This is unnecessary and pollutes the usefulness of tech articles.

They’ve become ways of making blog posts sound cooler, and businesses sound more innovative.

Real time

This just means that an app both has frequently updated data, and that it frequently updates its display of this data.

“Real time” just means fast data and fast analysis.

Cloud

This just means that it’s easier to have access to massive machine resources. The cloud is to the grid as computers are to power generators.

“The cloud” just means on-demand access to abstracted hardware.

So what?

A tech journalist calling an app “real time” or “cloud based” therefore tells me nothing other than that it quickly eats and displays data, and that it runs on abstracted hardware. So what?

I’d guess that anyone reading this post could build an app that does that in 5 minutes. It’s not hard.

A new tech-journalism

I want to read about how the app wants to get customers, how it tries to convert and retain them, what the market size is, what its costs are, and how its revenue and acquisition are going.

If there is actually some innovation going on, great! But I most of all want to know about the fundamentals.

I often find myself reading an article in Tech Crunch, or reading through comments on news.yc and then having to google to find out wtf the company’s actual business model is. I often come up blank.

For example

Not to pick on them, but Flightcaster, a company that predicts flight delays, is a great example of a company with a cool premise, a decent amount of real-time-cloud hype and, unless I’m missing something, an entirely unclear business model.

Flightcaster looks at a bunch of data. Great! That’s cool. Now tell me, apart from a $10 iphone app w/ unknown downloads, how they are going to make money, then tell me how many customers they have, then tell me how many repeat customers they have.

You can find entire interviews that tech journalists do with flightcaster where the word “money” is not mentioned once.

Please

In 2010, I hope tech journalists dispense with useless adjectives like “real time,” return to planet earth, and start reporting on the the factors that actually drive business. I’ll pay for this reporting.

This may require actual investigation, rather than cmd+c and cmd+v-ing company blog posts.