The iPad Unveiled -- My Thoughts

For those of you who are into mobile and technology, today was the momentous day when Apple unveiled its iPad tablet device। A group of us at AOL's NYC office gathered in a conference room to watch the event live and experience the moment together on Justin।tv (There were 114K concurrent viewers which is about as much as MSNBC on a good day).

I am not going to go over the iPad feature by feature, I’m sure sites like Engadget and TUAW (The Unofficial Apple Weblog) will cover in great detail। Instead I want to focus on the implications of this new device.

The iPad is basically a giant iPod Touch, but it's a device gets the computer out of the way for the ordinary American consumer. It’s a nice size and weights about a pound. The price starting at $499 is aimed solidly at the middle class and will surely come down in its 2nd and 3rd iterations. I travel daily on Metro North and see hundreds of iPhone users amongst millions worldwide. These users will naturally gravitate to the iPad as a complementary device that they will use for infotainment at home. Apple is establishing a lifelong relationship with them and they will spend million and millions buying content.

The Kindle is dead. Early reports indicate that the iPad has a much nicer more readable screen. Besides the fact that it is in color and that it does more than read books. Add to that that Apple has launched the iBook bookstore it is now directly challenging Amazon and Barnes & Noble in the selling of electronic media. Apple has basically chased Amazon and certainly B&N out of the hardware market.

Apple is releasing the WiFi version first followed a month later by the 3G version. I see no reason why users would wait and pay more for 3G (plus the monthly fee).

From an applications development perspective it seems that the iPad is running the standard iPhone OS (There may be some iPad specific API calls in the SDK). It runs all iPhone applications out of the box, but customized applications (like the NY Times which was shown) would look better. As a result of larger screen however newer interactions between people sharing the device will result in new forms of applications. The form factor of the small screen mobile device has been broken so it is possible to create a app that could use a bigger screen. How about watching live streaming TV and AIM at the same time.

All in all, just like the iPhone I think the iPad will gain an audience among a large section of American consumers. My search colleague Oscar Kafati pointed out that there are over 15 million college students in the US. Imagine everyone toting an iPad instead of a laptop and having their college texts available on them. It will happen.

Twitter Makes Me Smarter

Even though I've been aware of Twitter for the past 2 years, I've been using it in earnest only in the past couple of weeks. As I've tweeted and followed people something amazing has happened -- I've become smarter.

One way really smart people succeed (I'm conceited enough to consider myself somewhat smart) is that they surround themselves with smarter people. The smart person, even one who is an expert in his own domain, realizes that there are people out their who know more. The smart person is open to new ideas and he tries to leverage the experience of others.

One distinct downside to the "smart people" strategy is that you have to be in a place where you can encounter the smart types. Further you have to work at cultivating personal and professional relationships over time so that you can build a useful network of smart people. Such things require careful planning, social skills, and a bit of luck of being at the right place and the right time. I tend to fall short in all three areas.

Twitter however has captured the imagination of some of the Internet's leading thinkers and entrepreneurs. They're all seemingly happy to share in realtime their thoughts, ideas, interests, what they're reading, and where they are.

My new "friend" Steve Case, the founder of AOL and former Chairman of AOL Time Warner, has ordered the new version of Amazon.com Kindle book reader; Kevin Rose, the co-founder of Digg is fascinated by speech-to-text software created by AT&T Labs that produces natural sounding voices; and Joe Trippi (Howard Dean's campaign chief) is passionate about democracy in Zimbabwe.

Through Twitter I'm learning about venture capitalism from Fred Wilson; the inner workings of Google from Matt Cutts, and Kara Swisher is keeping me up-to-date on what she's finding out interviewing Silicon Valley executives.

Many of these people on Twitter are letting their guard down and being themselves. Since most people let anyone follow them there is a social contract of sorts that exists in Twitterverse that people will treat each other with mutual respect and not misuse people's tweets. Will this last or will one Twitter scandal cause people to retreat back into their offices? I hope not, but in the meanwhile I feel privileged to be sharing the thoughts of some of the Net's brightest minds.

The Big Whopper Flameout

It started with so much promise and ended with a flame-out.

Burger King had a cool idea in its new Whopper Sacrifice campaign: a) install an application on your Facebook page b) sacrifice/remove 10 of your friends from your social graph c) get a coupon for a free whopper.

The strategy shows that Burger King (or at least its ad agency) totally gets Web 2.0. In fact I would even call the execution brilliant. The notion of deciding which “friends” to eliminate turns the whole social networking idea on its head. Even better as you sacrifice “friends” Facebook’s newsfeed lets the world know which victims don’t make the cut.

And then the big let down. First to claim the coupon Burger King makes you fill out a form that asks for everything but your first born’s left foot. Name, Cell Number, E-mail address, Postal Address, Gender. Come on guys isn’t the fact that you have access to my Facebook profile enough?

But here’s the real kicker. After all that work BK tells me that my coupon will be delivered in two to four weeks. WTF?!

How could people who came up with this great idea be such morons?

Users of online media want immediate gratification ie. a coupon on the web screen, via e-mail or on SMS. Telling me that a coupon will come in a month is outrageous and ridiculous.

The Whopper may be flame broiled but someone’s brain at BK is fried.

No More Talking/Texting While Driving

Agence France Press reports that a Canadian company, Aegis Mobility, has created new technology called DriveAssist that intercepts phone calls and text messages while a person is driving.

DriveAssist uses GPS and other technologies to detect if the person is moving at a speed which indicates he is in a car.

Many jurisdictions like New York and Connecticut forbid talking on a cell phone while driving without a hands-free device like a speaker phone or bluetooth headset because of distractions associated with such activity. Even this restriction however isn't foolproof because one still has to look at the screen to dial.

Smart phones such as the iPhone complicate matters because I often look at Google Maps and directions while I'm driving.

I think DriveAssist is a good feature. Unfortunately it is being offered on a carrier-by-carrier basis for a monthly fee.

I think that this creates a potential legal problem for carriers and handset manufacturers. If blocking calls from those that are driving is considered a safety feature then not including it in a phone or service plan for free may be considered a product defect.

As such carriers/manufactures may become liable to those who are injured by customers who used phones that lacked such blocking features.

Obama Advertises in a Video Game

Campaign ads for presidential candidate Sen. Barak Obama are appearing in the the video game Burnout Paradise.

Roadside billboard advertising in the real world is nothing new. Images stay with us as we cruise down the ashphalt highway. I think the impact is even greater in a video game because players are more engaged with what they are seeing on screen.

Obviously there are people at the Obama campaign are really thinking about how to engage with younger voters.

In game ad revenue also is a smart move by game publishers. GigaOm confirmed with Electronic Arts that the Obama campaign purchased the spots through them.

As a parent who recently purchased a Wii for my son, I wonder though how I would feel about ads for McDonalds or other companies appearing while my son is playing Wii Tennis? Kids are marketed to too much already, and there need to be some areas that are just ad free.

Perhaps in the future we'll be seeing games being sold in ad-supported and ad-free versions. The latter costing a little bit more of course.

No 3G For Me!

Riding the Metro-North train into New York City one morning I spied a fellow commuter reading the New York Times. My attention was drawn to an AT&T Wireless ad for the iPhone. "Half the Price. Twice the Speed!," it proclaimed.

Yeah right, I said to myself as I turned my attention back to the screen of my Jesus phone that was still struggling to download a page over 3G even though I had full bars. So much for walking on water, I was having a better experience when I was on the EDGE with iPhone 1.0.

The slow experience has been widespread, and to be honest I haven't personally noticed any improvement from Apple's 2.02 firmware upgrade.

In this vain a couple of articles caught my attention this morning.

First the folks at Wired have come out with a nifty study that assesses the speed of various 3G networks worldwide. Wired gathered data from 2,636 participants (1,638 were in the United States). They found that European T-Mobile users reported the fastest 3G Download Speeds: 1,822 Kbps on average. In the U.S. AT&T was puttering along at 990 Kbps.

For those who are more visually minded Wired teamed-up with Zeemaps to create a Google Maps mash-up to show their respondents in clusters and provide signal strength indicators by geography. (The map has been so popular that it's taken down Zeemaps).

The problem it seems is not device related. All Thing :D citing a Reuters story reported this morning that the Blackberry Bold is experiencing similar sluggish speeds on the AT&T network. According to Citi Investment Research analyst Jim Suva, "There were a few occasional high-speed signal-dropping problems, especially on streets with tall buildings. The handset's EDGE network capability immediately picked up the signal, but at slower Internet speeds."

Still, Suva's analysis seems qualitatively based. A more scientific analysis is offered by Sweden's Bluetest which sells test chambers for wireless devices. In comparing the antennas of the iPhone, Nokia N73, and the Sony Ericsson P1. The test found that there was substantially no difference in the quality of reception between the devices.

The problem thus seems network based. Watch out AT&T! The sharks will surely circle.

AOL Mobile Search Grabs a Silver

The folks at mocoNews.net awarded AOL Mobile Search a Silver medal today in a faceoff against other search engines for the query term "Olympics". Google and Yahoo tied for Gold and MSN got a bronze.

The key differentiator seems to be that Google and Yahoo show medal results and ranking while AOL doesn't. On the other hand AOL showed Olympic themed ringtones which we get source from Thumplay.

I think MocoNews' point is well taken. Ideally the recipe for the term "Olympics" should be Medal Results, News, News Pictures, Web Sites, Mobile Websites.

This is an awful lot of content to fit on a page but as mobile browsers become more full featured I can see mobile "One Clicks" being developed in the same way that AOL services such content for the desktop search.

In the meantime I'm glad we beat out MSN and have a good target in Yahoo! to shoot for.