stevenf.com - Old World vs. New World Computing
Mike Rundle - The iPad Is For Everyone But Us
Jim Stodgil - The iPad is the iPrius
Rob Foster - On iPads, Grandmas and Game-chaninging
There are many people that use computer out of necessity, but don't understand them. Often, they fear or resent them. The iPad is a computer that doesn't ask them to become conceptual computer people to use it.
My 2 year old can use my iPhone without instruction. She can launch games, and play them. The iPad is equally discoverable.
We nerds will cling to out windowing systems, our terminals and our customized interfaces. We will add the storage we want, and push the envelope of configuration. Everyone else will enjoy a simple computing device that lets them accomplish their tasks and then move on.
]]>The above article does an excellent job putting a point on thoughts I've been having since the iPhone came out. The iPhone and iPad completely hide and eliminate all the "power" features that I love about computing–and that frustrate everyone I know who isn't a geek.
Clearly Apple is a leader in this movement. I think people forget that Google is trying the same thing with Android and Chrome OS. The action in computing appliances is Apple and Google, and I would not be surprised if this becomes a market that is much larger in units and revenue than the PC market is today.
Where's Microsoft in this? They dominated the PC era, but they seem as flatfooted in the NC era as IBM was in the PC era. Surely the brains in Seattle are waking up to this threat–but Windows 7 and Windows Mobile represent a pitiful response.
IBM has thrived by maintaining ownership of Big Computing. They're still the dominant mainframe company. Perhaps Microsoft will do the same with PCs, and step aside as someone else takes the lead for the next generation.
Here's to hoping no one gets a monopoly this time. Our world is a better place with Apple and Google keeping each other on their toes.
]]>I’m a serial early-adopter. I own most of the devices the iPad seeks to supplant. Here’s my early assessment of the iPad and it’s role in the market.
iPad the eBook
I’m a Kindle user. I had the first Kindle, and I have a Kindle 2. I’ve watched the Nook, the Skiff and the Que with great interest. I’m also an avid reader. I read several books a month, subscribe to multiple magazines. I read my news online, as I find the latency of newspaper bothersome and the format cumbersome. The Kindle has been a dream for book reading. I have a large library of new material available via the Kindle store anywhere there’s 3G coverage. The e-Ink display is quite easy on the eyes for multi-hour reading sessions, largely thanks to its reflexive nature (there is no backlight–as you see with the printed page).
It seems to me that the iPad may reverse this equation. The LED backlight supporting the IPS LCD display means the announced iBooks app renders books far more artfully than the Kindle, and in color. The ePub format offers native support for GIF, JPEG and PNG images. I’m concerned that the bright screen may ultimately fatigue the eyes over continuous hours of viewing. You don’t state at your phone or computer screen for as long or as intently as you do a book in most cases. Likewise, LCD screens aren’t all the readable in sunlight, and I see little support that the iPad screen is any different. The iBooks app has a much smaller library than the Kindle as well, although I find this mitigated to a large degree by the availability of a Kindle app for the iPhone. iPhone apps, of course, work on the iPad.
The Kindle clearly wins on battery life. Frequent travelers know that it’s often trying to get charge time while on the go.
Of course, books are not the only content available on the Kindle. You can get magazines and newspaper subscriptions as well. They are easy to purchase and are automatically delivered to the Kindle. Unfortunately, the magazine experience is poor on the Kindle. Glossy, 4 color printing really defines what it is to read a magazine. Rich photographs and illustrations mix sublimely with the copy. For content that isn’t time sensitive, like product reviews and deep analysis of current events, the magazine offers a superior experience to not only the Kindle, but indeed to the web.
Consider the newspaper instead. Color is less of an issue, but the power of a newspaper is not the quality of its printing. Here the format is the king. The large size of a newspaper makes it easy to scan a large, diverse body of information quickly, and then focus on content you want to review in depth with a couple of folds. The very linear orientation of the Kindle UI works against this model–it’s easiest to read something from start to finish. Scanning is painful thanks to e-Ink’s glacial refresh rate.
I see real potential for the iPad to revolutionize not only book publishing, but newspaper and magazine as well. The iPad addresses both limitations: the screen is in brilliant color, and the Touch UI makes scanning a breeze. Like the Kindle (and unlike computers) the iPad is a comfortable format for reading almost anywhere.
The New York Times app demoed today shows the promise here, but I think the app model is wrong. Apps are too hard to develop, and I’d rather buy newspapers and magazines along side my books. Apple needs to build an extensible format like ePub, but with greater support for interaction and rich media. Heck, it could be HTML in WebKit for all I care, just make it easy for old media companies to make beautiful content for the device, but give them the ability to serve video and interactive elements alongside it. People will pay for it in a way they will not pay for something seen in Safari.
iPad the Netbook/Mobile Internet Device
The computer and consumer electronics industries are focused on filling the gap that exists between the smartphone and the notebook computer. We’ve seen netbooks running Windows and Linux. We’ve seen netbooks oriented toward cloud computing with no local storage. We’ve seen tablets and Mobile Internet Devices. None have made the splash that the iPad did today.
Steve Jobs was very direct today that Apple believes the iPad is the right approach to a device and platform that fits that space. As a rabid capitalist, I believe there’s plenty of room in the market for multiple approaches, and that the competition is good for the competitors and consumers. The iPad does draw a strong philosophical line in the sand.
The iPad, like the iPhone, is geared toward simplicity and elegance over flexibility. The technologically savvy cry against the lack of Flash, multitasking or ports. In the netbook space, many people debate the merits of local vs. cloud based storage. On a netbook, you choose what your OS is, and you can install whatever apps from whatever source you please.
On the iPad, you don’t have to know what Flash, multitasking, ports, Operating Systems or cloud based storage is. You just use the device. There’s no visible file system. No obvious distinction is made between local and cloud storage. Apps only install via the App Store. This offers great protection from malware, but much less flexibility for developers.
The inclusion of iWork shows Apple is making the iPad a content creation platform, instead of a pure content consumption platform. I’ll be interested to see if Microsoft Office comes to the iPad, and how Mac/PC application devs approach this development.
iPad the future of computing
It’s clear that Apple sees the iPhone/iPad model as the future of computing, and is actively migrating their product family toward it. The iPod is evolving via the iPod Touch and the iPad pushes the iPhone model much farther into “computer” territory. I wonder if Apple sees PCs and Macs as HAM Radios in 20 years: tools for a specific, passionate niche.
With the iPhone and iPad, you touch information. There is less abstraction than we see with the keyboard and mouse, although Apple’s support of keyboard on the iPad shows they understand the efficiency of that device. I hope Apple is busily pushing this model toward the Mac and OS X. While touch-only is a poor model for displays on desktops and notebooks, the compromise offered via multi-touch trackpads and mice isn’t enough. Why can’t we use a mouse and direct touch?
Also, when does the iPad get a camera?
;)
]]>As a matter of disclosure, my company works with Aflac in a marketing capacity, and I personally work on the account as well.
]]>What concerns me is there is an inherent bias in the textual descriptions that it's important to move to "higher" categories. The implicit statement is that everyone should aspire to have more followers and more engagement. I see this over and over in different tools, and I see it discussed among social media professionals and marketers. It's complete hogwash.
Most people using social media are not marketers. They don't really care about gaining large numbers of friends or followers. They want to connect with friends, family and people with similar interests. They share information about their lives and the things the love. They don't look for analytics on their profile.
They shouldn't.
I'm a professional social media marketer. I derive my income from designing and executing social marketing strategies for major brands. My social media accounts are not a test lab for my work. I only accept friend requests from people I know on Facebook, and I only send invites to people I know well. On Twitter, I follow people I know and people who make me laugh. My goals for my personal profiles are to connect with those who I know and love, not to promote myself. I believe the work I do for my clients is far more impressive than any follower count I could ever achieve.
That said, if you are a potential customer or partner for one of the brands I represent, you can bet that I'm doing everything I can to reach out to you in a non-intrusive way via company profiles or advertising. I want brand profiles to reach the largest relevant audience and to engage as many members of that audience as possible. Companies and people have completely different goals in social media.
It's important that we marketers, new media gurus and brands don't lose site of who is creating a revolution in social media--regular people.
]]>Think back to Apple before Steve Jobs returned to the company. The company had lost its innovative spirit. The Mac suffered from an OS strategy that was lost in the wilderness and hardware that did little to advance the differences between Macs and other PCs. Apple was coasting on the amazing innovations it pioneered in the early 80s. Certainly, Apple tried to break the mold with break through projects like the Newton, but the implementation of those concepts weren't viable in the marketplace. Apple was either ahead of the curve, or botched the implementation.
Then Steve came back.
Apple followers found themselves on a wild ride. Apple found a tight focus in its OS strategy and began to make major strides quickly. Simultaneously, we watched as the hardware became candy colored, then grey and white, then all white and finally aluminum. In all those transitions, radical changes in the appearance of Mac models and lines were a regular occurrence. Think about the evolution of the iMac from a friendly bubble, to a sunflower, to a picture frame on a stand and finally an aluminum frame on a stand. The pace of change was dizzying.
All this iteration created products that increasingly resonated in the marketplace. Apple capitalized on the major ground shift to OS X and Intel, and wrapped it in an industrial design that continues to stand above its competition. Sales continue to rise, as does the quality of Apple's hardware. Each years product is more enjoyable to use than the last's.
This comes with a price. Mac hardware announcements are not as exciting as they were 5 or 10 years ago. That's not to say the products are bad: I'm absolutely in love with the MacBook Air I'm typing on now--but this MacBook Air is an awful lot like the last MacBook Air I had. Mac Industrial Design has become largely iterative and evolutionary.
It's clear the iPod, iPod Touch and iPhone are reaching a similar place. The form factor of these products is so successful, and the process of manufacturing these products so effective that iteration is all Apple needs to stay in front of competitors.
Apple is still in the revolution business. The iPhone didn't exist 5 years ago. The iPod didn't exist 10 years ago, and nether did the iTunes Store. Apple is in a place where they have the ability to invent category disrupting products, which they follow with a series of rapid, massive revision followed by a mature cycle of refinement and iteration. It's an amazing business model, and certainly benefits me as a customer.
The nerd in me always hungers for that category buster though. I love to watch the rules of the game change.
PS - Home Sharing is awesome.
]]>We're all experiencing the transformative effects of the much-hyped social media technologies. The decentralization and democratization of human communication warrants the discussion volume we see–after all, any voice in the crowd can now address millions of people. The effects on human communication, and even human consciousness, from things like Facebook and Twitter will reshape much of western civilization. Even without the development of new technology, or even iterations of our current platforms the effects of extended mind theory are surfacing. There's no doubt in my mind that Google has become a vast, shared extended mind for many people. As more and more people adopt Facebook, Twitter and other tools, our extended mind may begin to become even more collaborative--and the emergence of a primitive collective consciousness will follow. In fact, I believe it already has--but that is the topic of another post for another day. The fact is, new technologies are emerging.
One of the most exciting emergent tools is geo metadata. Thanks to the increasing amount of devices that incorporate both digital logic and GPS receivers, applications are emerging that take advantage of location to offer compelling services. Urbanspoon and Yelp on the iPhone are great examples. They show you restaurants and/or other local vendors along with reviews of those locations by people who have been there. Extending this model further leads to social networks build around location like Loopt and Google Latitude. These networks let you see where your friends are in relation to you and what they are doing. None of these services offer the user base or depth of functionality of Facebook, nor the quirky charm of Twitters communal stream of consciousness but they are great sings of what's to come.
As GPS hardware becomes ubiquitous, it will make sense for Facebook (or whoever the leader in social networking may be) to add geo metadata to their platform. Imagine if you could sort the Facebook Newsfeed by proximity to you instead of time, or if you could view your friends photos by location instead of by who's in them. The technology to do this exists today. All we need are more people accessing social networks from mobile devices with GPS to make this critical mass technology.
The addition of geo metadata sets the stage for the really amazing stuff--augmented reality. Augmented reality is a modern cousin to virtual reality of old. Simply stated, augmented reality is the ability to accurately place computer generated images in 3D space over live video. Most of the accessible iterations of augmented reality so far have been impressive marketing initiatives. My favorite is a site that will turn you into a Transformer if you have a web cam. It's completely useless but fun.
Much more useful, exciting and transformative is augmented reality applied to mobile devices. The easiest way to show the potential here is to share a video of an app already released.
In this demo, the iPhone becomes a veiw port to a hidden world. It takes data and turns it into a virtual, physical world invisible to the naked eye. Now imagine if the data set accessed by this application was not subway stops, but instead the location of your friends. Or, your friends status updates. Or, the sushi restaurants nearest to you, along with reviews made by your friends (or strangers if you choose). What if images taken by your friends appeared in the locations they were taken?
The technology exists. All of it. Once these data sets connect and become accessible, books like Daemon and Snow Crash are less science fiction and more social commentary.
I can't wait.
]]>I just returned from a week's vacation. I went on a cruise to Mexico and the Cayman Islands and I was completely without digital communications of any kind. Forget email, instant messaging or Twitter–I didn't have my cell phone. As a result, my communication with other people was much more focused.
Conversations with other people were much more cohesive. I retained more of what was said, and the usual scattered nature caused by all participants checking their mobile was gone. Likewise, information gathering via reading or TV was more streamlined. Whatever I was doing received my full attention.
Now that I've returned to civilization, I'm shocked by how distracting my life is. Even after I've worked through thousands of emails and countless messages in social media I still find myself bombarded by constant notifications that I have more information. The combined feed of IM, email, Twitter, RSS and other messaging services is overwhelming. It seems that in just one week I lost my ability to juggle it all.
I find myself asking if this significant. Would my family, company and clients be better if I offered them my complete attention sequentially instead of partial attention constantly? Have we sacrificed quality of focus in exchange for quantity of availability as a society? Would I do better work if I shut down messaging while working on client projects, or would my clients be frustrated that I was more difficult to reach while doing work for them?
I don't know the answer, but I'm inclined to find out.
]]>Shot shotguns, drove ATV, ate steak, built a fire, drank beer, and slept on the ground. It's the beginning of the summer of manliness.
(I would offer a link, but Stratton protects his updates.)
The theme of the Summer of Manliness stuck with me. I'm a life-long nerd, so most of my interests are not exactly the traditional platform for the Red Blooded Dude. I'm into video games, music, theology, fiction (mysteries, thrillers, sci-fi) and science. There are few things I enjoy more than a book I don't understand about quantum physics.
Now, I'm a dad of two beautiful girls. Living in a house with three women has encouraged me to more actively seek out activities that offer a counterpoint to thefemininepursuits. As a result, I've found myself spending time in the woods for things other than nature observation. I've returned to my love of fishing. I've gone muddin' on more than one occasion.
And I love to grill. This last point is the focal point of this post.
I've been served well by a gas-grill my parents gave me as a wedding present. It was nothing fancy, but it lasted for many years. It was easy to start, easy to clean and held a consistent temperature. Last year, it became worn enough that I decided to replace it.
So I bought a infrared Char-broil. Typically for me it was the most technologically advanced grill I could find at Lowe's. Infrared grills don't actually cook the food with gas, instead the gas element heats another element which then cooks the food with IR radiation. It was even easier to use and easier to clean than my first grill. I used it 5 or 6 times and then we got two Weimaraner puppies--who ate the grill.
I mean, not completely, but they ate the starter, the knobs and all the gas tubing. It's beyond my ability to repair.
We've been living a grill-less life, which is a shame. Grilled cooking is a cornerstone of my patented weight loss system.
This weekend I was at Walmart and I saw a Weber charcoal grill. It was a small fraction of the price of my previous grill. I've been curious about charcoal for a while, mainly because my dad has a large charcoal grill that produces some of the best steak I've ever had. So, I decided to get it.
I cooked steak and veggies on it the next day. It took 40 minutes to prepare the grill before I could cook on it. The instructions for the grill, charcoal and lighter fluid did not mention that charcoal burns without flame, so I managed to burn a lot of hair off my right hand in a massive fireball of redneck foolishness.
But the smell. My, oh my, the smell. Even before I lit the grill, the smell of the charcoal was wonderful. Once the coals burned down, the grill settled into a state of pure perfection. I cooked the steaks for 6 minutes a side, which was about double the time I'd use with a gas grill. The veggies were put on 8 minutes before the steaks.
They were the best steaks I've ever made. I'm now a believer: gas created an inferior steak. The charcoal imparts a character to the meat that delightful. Any part of the steak or veggies that was charred was wonderful--a complete contrast to the charring that happens on a gas grill.
In summary, charcoal grills are:
Weber, you had me at hello.
]]>