It browses beautifully. It’s battery lasts all day. It’s light. The color is beautiful. And quite simply you can hand it around the living room as you watch TV and ask your peers what they think about an article, video, post or perhaps more importantly, a purchase.
We have wondered and tested ourselves blue in the face to help determine why online conversion is low and unmovable. And it may be a simple few things like making the experience more friendly and welcoming to peers.
For instance I loved bring the Apple Air to bed to do my browsing…but the little fan couldn’t keep up and it would try to recirculate through my comforter; eventually the computer would slow and annoy me, the fan would whine, I’d feel guilty and I’d shut the whole mess off. But for the first fifteen minutes it was so much nicer than having 10 lbs. of laptop in bed.
I’m not saying the iPad brings you savior faire that before you lacked, but it is at least cool, quite, unobtrusive and can be disposed of or shared much more easily.
This is but one of the technology changes, be it pervasive broadband, to new computing forms that I believe will accelerate the ecommerce trends. There has never been a year where I’ve have more time in the day to go physically shopping and as the tools get better and the industry matures, tools like these may cause huge leaps in immovable conversion rates.
The snow has been dumping in Park City, Utah. Falling in huge car hiding piles…for the first time in one of the driest, saddest winters ever. And what drags me out of bed at dawn with a shovel and broken down snowblower was the fact that without some skinny path cleared to my door there was a chance that the FedEx guy might make me the last semi-blogger to get a hold of an actual iPad.
But FedEx came through and I plugged it in and waited for the lightening bolt to strike. I waited and failed through synch after synch…thinking it might be time for for Apple to spend a little time with the iTunes app and making it the happy center of the media universe that it’s supposed to be.
I keep hoping that iTunes will be great at synching this complex media world. And I keep hoping that somehow it will recognize that I am going to exceed the 16 Gigs right as I check the buttons of what I’d like on my iPad. But no, I wait, patiently and run through about fifteen dry runs before I get enough data off to make the iPad run.
But it’s not the optimum data load. But eventually I’ll get the hang of it.
And I inadvertently dumped all of the apps from my iPhone onto the iPad. What a mistake. A small iPhone app doesn’t belong on the iPad. Wait for those that are iPad ready.
And yet once it happens. Once the iPad fires up…the magic happens. It was when Netflix loaded that I first felt the magic. Just the media I want when I want it, beuatifully rendered. I preferred watching on my iPad than my 44″ 1080p flatscreen. The show felt more intimate. And the iPad never got warm in my lap. I thought I felt much of the media world begin shift to a new axis. And again and again as I loaded new apps I saw the media world shifting and twisting in, beginning to be caught between the old way of business and the new. Media will benefit first and suffer first. Commerce will come very shortly after.
We don’t yet know what the iPad will change . But there are some guesses:
Ecommerce will shift toward home and couch and bed, from primarily work.
The iPad will succeed
Netflix is going to kill on the iPad.
And the rest of the world is going to have to watch and wait to see what happens as we figure it out with them.
Well designed ecommerce sites run just fine on the iPad. No need to hire firms to redesign for a small form factor. Just build beautiful simple focues ecommerce sites and QA on all top four browsers and you should be fine
And build apps that have real single purpose that deliver value above and beyond the flat world of standard ecommerce site. It’s time to innovate in return for the gift that Steve Jobs has given us. He has allowed us to once again shift into the future.
Craigslist continues to disintermediate whole industries. And by disintermediate I mean crush them using the beautiful art of capitalism like dancing wu-li black practitioners. They have reduced costs in the ticket scalping industry to zero as
“(the iPad is) not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it” — PogueIn one sentence this anonymous scribe captured the essence of the iPad. It’s a consumer oriented cash generator with almost every form of payment waiting for you to join. We may well get out of this recession because Steve Jobs willed it to be.
One analyst just raised his 2010 sales number for the iPad to 8-10 million. Which is a ridiculous amount when you consider the category doesn’t exist yet. Which is silly for me to mention it’s not like the analysts spotted the housing crash, the dot com crash or any of the other eighty three recorded fiscal bubbles…but still, they are analysts and presumably they have more wisdom in their domain than I, so I listen.
But what I am guessing and feeling is that the iPad is going to revolutionize in a different way. The notion of personal browsing. That ecommerce+ will be at your fingertips and it will be incredibly powerful. This is not a browser who’s history you have to wipe to keep corporate from reading it, but instead your own that you carry with you…history of all messages, commerce browsing, blogging, writing, photography. The iPad will be the window into your own lives and others.
Ecommerce only represents 6% of total commerce in the US…but it’s the fast growing segment and will be for years to come. It is expected to grow 2% a year for the foreseeable future and that is without mobile factored in. The iPad will do an interesting thing in that it will help migrate those who have been resistant to ecommerce by way of a more friendly environment where commerce will, perhaps feel less threatening. So it will increasingly steal from the physical side of commerce. For the cognoscenti ecommerce will grow faster due to a deeper wallet share. Suddenly commerce that never would have happened over the web will be possible, be it the hot dog vendor or bike parts for a kick ass bike/community/commerce app. Those who comfortably spend on the web now will see their spending accelerate as the software grows to meet capabilities in the new hardware.
And in that way the iPad will work to combine the aspects of commerce that are already appealing with those of geo-tagging, nearest physical product, best price within five miles, and much more to move a large percentage of wallet share to the web. So ecommerce will grow, again at a much faster rate than it has. And it will grow in new, unexpected places that get the distinct advantages of this format. For instance in-game digital product sales might well grow at an astonishing rate.
And Android will follow along with their impossible to beat “Better Than Free” model and slowly and they will own the lower pricepoints. Yet this is a market that is already proven, the $275 netbook is very desirable. Add in a touch screen and phenomenal OS and it will be a dream browser. The Tablet is here to stay. And so is the app. A web page is nonspecific brochureware for the dying 2000s and an app is the perfect hyper-focused one purpose tool for which this generation was born to use.
High price-points will be Apple‘s as there is something luxurious in software and hardware designed together. But Android’s breadth of connectivity to massive data sets creates opportunities that I don’t have the brain power to imagine. Apple and Google do something that no other companies do, they create moments when the current and future exist at once. It’s this strange feeling, as if for a moment, we get a moment of living in the future just by way of a new product release. What a cool capability.
Tablets will not have to war for its share of computing. It will instead be the third form of computing and within 36 months the primary mode for ecommerce.We won’t stop using our laptops and desktops and we can’t give up our mobile phones.” The world never converges, it only diverges into more ways that we can stay in touch, buy, say hello, record our thoughts, support our existence.
SXSW managed to hang on to their cultural relevance for one more year by giving Cornify a win for best in Technical and Judges choice. A site that buries Easter eggs of magic unicorns all over the web can’t help but be the best thing ever. And yes the app is installed here. Just use the classic “Konami” code to make them start popping up.
Pepperdine, which according to Business Week (who apparently really really dig MBAs cause they spend about 50% of their editorial calendar blowing and fluffing the MBA programs of the world.*) is not a top tier business school. They sadly fall into what Business Week labels the “Second Tier”. Second tier in MBA programs is as appealing as being a Grenada based medical schools.
The problem in Pepperdine’s integrity goes as least as deep as its marketing department and its inability to write a survey. And writing survey’s is kind of thing one at a business school. Kind of the med school equivalent of stitches.
Yet at the end of their survey they ask this question which is nothing more than scum sucking attempt to either force an honest person to lie or they can choose to tell the truth and sign up for either the Presidential spam package or the Executive.
“* Would you like to learn more about Pepperdine MBA programs
PRESIDENTIAL MBA
Executive MBA
No, thank you. I have an MBA”
The correct thing to do would be to offer a fourth option, something like, “No thank you, I’m not interested in your marketing materials.” No need to debase those confused few who do not have MBAs and have yet to discover the many study’s that show that an MBA is as wise an investment as multi-level marketing or making deals to help the daughter of the ex-president of Zimbabwe free up some of her father’s cash which is unfortunately held by hooligans.
Which is to say big and loud and fast and it’ll piss a lot of people off.
Ironically it’s those in the Netbook world who look shocked and say, “look how much more we give for half the price?” I’ve got bad news for Netbookians…your computers suck. They’re slow and painful and cramped. But oh yes, they were cheap. And we love cheap.
But the iPad isn’t a nicely done Netbook. It isn’t a Kindle with color. It’s not an iPhone that met a steam roller. It is the the next fom of computing and it’s beautiful. Yes, as always, it’s missing some things. But it’s not like a boat missing a motor. It’s more like, well, an iPhone that launched without cut and paste. We suffered along while we all worked to change the world.
The truth is we carry 100X the computer we need in our laptop most of the time. Buried in a slow loading inconvenient poorly designed behemoth. The iPad can accomplish 95% of what we need our laptops for. Oh, we won’t get rid of our laptops. That five percent is crucial. We will just add the fourth form of computing to our lives. And it will be beautiful and we will wonder in two years how we ever ordered off a menu that wasn’t pre-loaded in our iPad with our built in payment system.
The iPad is our wallet, portfolio, memory, communication, calendaring…well it’s our life. It’s just not our phone replacement. Our bags got lighter. We’ll take the laptops home one the weekends for heavy work.
Desktops? How cute…they’ll be good for towing behind cars or some such anti-world recreation. But the iPad will be our center.
And yes Android will follow and it will be good. It will be the Chevy 3/4 ton to the beautiful Pininfarina like lines of the iPod. Change is good and at first it will look effete and snobbish. But soon it will be real. And Microsoft and RIM and others will head for other shores, other businesses where they don’t have to compete with such smart people.. Most of our computing is simple and can even be fun. and it’s always better when it has location. The world continues to change whether we bought a two pound Droid with a worthless keyboard or not. The iPad makes me happy.
I’m way off the back on this but I had to to jot it down. UStream launched their iPhone app recently and it’s simply one of the coolest and scariest pieces of technology I’ve ever seen. The app turns your iPhone into a realtime broadcast device. Your camera films and transmits whatever lies in front of it.
You have to see it function to feel the impact and realize how our lives have changed forever with this one application. Lets say you get pulled over and are concerned about how you are going to be treated. Flip on the app, spin the phone to face the side window and broadcast in real time your experience. Officer Friendly is, unbenknownst to him on live TV.
When you visit their site it is astonishing to see what streams are currently live. Endless litters of puppies under heat lamps…and and audience of 25 people watching them sleep. And the watchers happily chat with each other.
The scary side is that, even though the technology for video phones has existed since the 60s, but most people don’t want to be seen most of the time. Broadcasting our lives is uncomfortable and yet you no longer get to decide whether somebody’s iPhone UStream camera feed is catching you at any given time and broadcasting it to the world. Giving up your privacy is scary. Giving individuals the power to broadcast is amazing. The world will never be the same. Rictus.
Oh, and the application is beautiful and works seamlessly, shouting out to (I can’t say the sill word tweeples) twitter, broadcasting your location and allowing you to chat with your audience at the same time. Truly brilliant development.
Cool, Google’s new UI only shows 39 characters on the screen, including logo, TM and spaces. And I probably counted that wrong. Until you roll your mouse and then the regular UI reappears all Harry Potter and the Invisible Map style. Credit Veruus for pointing it out.
“Instructions for Installing Themes on Your Android
1. Rename the theme to update.zip
Themes usually come in .zip format with a title. It is important to change file name to update.zip. You will need to right click file, and then right click again to rename.
If you have multiple themes that you want to download, just download them to a separate folder and remember to follow the instructions and download them to the SD card and then rename with update.zip.
2. To the root of your SD card, copy update.zip.
You need to copy update.zip to the root of your SD card and not to a folder but directly on the letter drive.
3. Reboot the phone in recovery mode…”
It goes on for another thousand words and seven or so more steps.
If you have to tell your users to rename, unpack, reboot…IN RECOVERY MODE, then we’re a little too close to Windows ’95. These days I expect my computers to do all that geekery for me. If they can’t then their UI is just not quite up to par.
Image doesn’t relate to the article…I just knew this guy back in the day and Zemanta thinks that “O’Reilly” and “Reilly” are somehow related in its really cool suggest an image tool. Oops. Whaddup Tony?
An O’Reilly reader asked the question, “should I dump my iPhone for an Android?” and it seems to be a question that is being asked more and more. The simple answer is no, unless you are a very early adopter with a massive tolerance for behaviors like your phone crashing. There is much criticism of AT&Ts network and the occasional dropped call. I, being a pathetic dork, carry both phones at the moment. I lose one or two calls a week due to AT&Ts shoddy network. And my iPhone crashes maybe once a month…maybe less. And that’s the thing with my phone, it’s like a light switch or a car, you want it to work every single time you turn the key or flip the switch.
A crashed OS and a bad network leave you with the same result…no phone. That’s not okay. AT&Ts network seems to be improving faster than the next version of the Droid will arrive.
And the Android crashes constantly. They use nice words like “forced restart of search application” or some such thing, but the truth is I have to sit and wait for my basically beta version phone to settle down and begin working again. I am confident that by version 3.0 things will be rock stable. But right now the Droid is the crash-o-matic.
The question is kind of a, “should I buy an Acura or a Maserati?” thing. One of them is cool and works beautifully all the time and the other one doesn’t look nearly as cool ’cause it’s in the shop several days a month. But Maserati’s are cool in their own way. If you want a second phone, Droid it up.
Phonegap is a new open source multi-environment development tool. One of my biggest fears around the incredible race between Apple and Android has been about the cost of doing dual application development. Mobile feels a scary enough jungle when you are looking at Apple development, but add in the multi-verse of Android phone builders with a myriad of screen sizes and other strangeness and it looks like a massive amount of friction. Thankfully the software world is filled with the smartest people in the world who perceive problems beyond the horizon time and again and rush to fill the coming void.
My guess is that the Apple Tablet will be an overwhelming hit which will change personal computing once again…but add yet another layer to development. And my guess is that Phonegap will be there quickly as well. So thanks Phonegap. Read about it on CNET
The iPhone is the most beautiful design and business exercise I’ve ever seen. I am happily humbled by Apple for their vision and incredible operational excellence. They saw and created a future of which I hadn’t even dreamed. The iPhone set me free.
And yet…so did Compuserve in its day. Compuserve and the Mosaic browser let me run about the web as fast as my 14.4k modem would allow, from one Star Trek fan site to another. And it became both my vocation and avocation. The iPhone, ten years after I first started working on the mobile web finally delivered on the promise of the richness of the web combined with dynamic community and localization. Thank you Apple.
When we take our first timid steps in a new technology we seek safety, familiarity and comfort; and the iPhone delivers. It lets us safely download apps that have been approved and search around the well lit corners of the nice part of Internet town…but it’s a bit like a cruise ship. You can’t ever really get in trouble. It’s kinda fun for a while, but the captain never invites you up to steer it or do donuts with the thing. And eventually you want to see the whole ocean.
And the Droid…well, it’s like Netscape 1.0. It crashes more than I did in high school, which is to say, a lot. And it lets you get the full unfettered internet, location and community access. Want to download an app that steals your private data…go ahead. Want to download an app that instantly violates federal wiretapping statutes…it’s one click. Seeking something really unsavory, it exists or is in development right now. I don’t even dare to imagine the things that are to come.
The world of Adult entertainment has often been the north star of the internet, showing us where web business is going. Take a look at the origins of most video streaming software or even internet traffic tracking companies.
And trust me, the iPhone’s bevy of bikini girl apps is really not going to satisfy the seemingly insatiable cultural appetite for prurient content. And in that part of the world the Droid wins hands down. The porn world has gotten a seat back in the game.
In the 90s Yahoo failed when it couldn’t keep up with the endless requests for sites to be added to its directory. It was excruciating to wait and see if your site would get accepted and practically business death if you weren’t. And Yahoo was unblinking as they ignored every request for information on how or whether you would get in. Even when they started charging $300 to get guaranteed placement it still didn’t really satisfy a webmasters desire for instant inclusion. Which is why DMOZ came about and eventually things like Wikipedia. The community does a better job policing massive amounts of content then a small group of censors with unclear by-rules.
And the four week wait for a developer to see if their efforts to fly in the Apple world just isn’t going to work. In the Web3.0 world we are being trained to expect real time in absolutely everything.
Android delivers the vicious one-two punch of instant inclusion and boundless content. And that is too mighty for Apple to beat. In the late 90s we ran as fast as we could from AOL into the arms of Earthlink and Comcast so that we could get the full web and not the pre-chewed variety. In 24 months or less the iPhone will be the choice of fussy Meerschaum pipe smoking ascot wearing professors and the rest of the world will be carrying Android 4.o phones that allow us full unfettered access to the world of content and applications.
It seems likely that a wikipedia of applications will come to fruition with a community of trusted testers and a standards body run by the community will come about. And when we see that BBB of mobile web, we will find trust. Until then, buyer beware.
But it’s going to be a cool winding road getting there…filled with missteps, crashes and eventually government intervention.
And Google will become a bevy of little Googlets, split up by the privacy fear mongers. This is the coolest movie I’ve ever not seen and I can’t wait.
I borrowed $2,000 from my Mom for a white box 486/66 with four megs of memory and with it I started a newspaper, a journalism career and my first Web site. The white box was the theoretical bottom limit that could run Windows 3.1. And it could, sort of. It was all you could do, if you went to open a big program like notepad the whole system would crash with the screeching of failed temp storage on the itty-bitty hard-drive. Going from four megs to eight remains the greatest upgrade I’ve ever made. Suddenly I could compute…write articles, open up one of the thirty daily AOL or Compuserve disks I’d get. (76762@cserve.com or something like that).
I’m a bit geekier than average but still what I tote in my backpack isn’t wildly out of the ordinary:
Top Ten Items to Maintain Minimum Computing and Connectivity
1. Macbook Pr0 15.4″. Anything smaller is just annoying for spreadsheets and any larger and you can’t use it on an airplane. It’s simply the best laptop made for the hardcore business user. It’s intuitive, has long lasting batteries, huge piles of ram and every few months it just gets cooler. It’s the centerpiece of your geekdom.
2. Mac Air – Why both? Well they’re for totally different purposes. The Air is a beautiful engineering excercise. It starts in a nanosecond, grabs a wireless connection before I can say Linksys and just generally works beautifully for 90% of my computing needs. It’s great to pass around the couch with a must-see You Tube clip and it for some reason is less offensive to bring to bed than than the MacBook Albatross. But it heats up fast in your lap and just doesn’t have enough of a graphic card. I love my Air so much that I’m not sure which one I’d grab in the event of a fire.
3. iPhone- Simply the best phone made today. The day I got my iPhone was as important as the day I got email. And it just keeps getting better. The camera is astonishing and the UI is an entire doctrine on simplicity as the soul of usability. I have nothing but the deepest respect for the product gurus who took us from the Motorola Rokr to the iPhone. That’s like going from the Pinto to the Bugatti Veyron. It simply can’t be done.
4. Kindle DX- I love the Kindle. I love it’s one way-ness. I love that it buries me by Whispernet under an avalanche of content and yet doesn’t really allow me to create a single email response. I am not looking for another computer, I’m looking for a tool that will help me organize and get through some small percentage of the many blogs and books I hope to read. Amazon has give me back the gift of reading.
5. Verizon MiFi 2200 – It’s a cellular modem/wireless hub the size of a credit card. It can support five concurrent connections, be they iPhone’s or laptops. It has a four hour battery built in and the speed is reasonable. It’s perfect in my RV and allows me to get rid of the relatively bad Autonet wireless hub.
6. Apple TV – I don’t know why it doesn’t get better reviews. Since I got this I don’t need cable any longer and with the MiFi it works in the car. No more scratched DVDs.
7. Motorola Droid – I hate that I love this phone. It’s a mishmash of usability errors combined with raw genius. It hints at the Jetson-like future of mobile Internet.
8. Valentine One radar locator– I keep waiting for something better but it’s still the best thing to keep you on the right side of Johnny Law.
9. Oakley Thump sunglasses, V1. They’re so bad they’re good. It’s like the M-frame all over again. When you turn up the thump nobody bothers you. They look away painfully and make mullet jokes and that’s worth big money. Poison sounds especially good on those.
10. Party Blimp– Every remote control airplane I’ve ever flown has died in the first five minutes. The party blimp, filled with helium from WalMart, cruises slowly around the house safely bumping into everything and breaking nothing. It’s a remote controlled vehicle for someone with my limited skills.
Don’t get me wrong, slide rules are cool. We never would have gotten a man on the moon without them. I’m always envious of anyone who can run a slide rule or an abacus or even the classic Texas Instruments 12-C. Tools like these are amazing, deeply layered and powerful. They are often the engines that true scientists use to change our world, innovation by innovation.
As I slowly get to understand the Droid I realize that it is a far more layered and powerful machine than I realized at first glance. It is rife with problems but even more deeply loaded with innovation and promise.
The App market is the wild west, with every download a gamble; many of them crashing right out of the gate. And I wonder if I’m giving login information to hucksters. I just don’t have the faith in the Android marketplace that I do in Apple‘s App store. But it’s cool.
There are physical aspects of the Droid that are wonderments, like the haptic touch screen keyboard. And there are physical aspects that are embarassingly bad, like the slide out QWERTY keyboard. It’s wholly unnecessary due to the excellent software.
The more I explore the more I learn to love the Droid. But it does not make me love my iPhone any less. The iPhone just works and it works beautifully and when it comes to communicating, be it text or voice, I want something straight forward that never crashes and has the usability of a simple light switch. In mobile simple is great. But the Droid, while overloaded with stuff, is a fascinating device.
The Droid is far more phone than I gave it credit for initially. It’s seems inconceivable but in the two weeks that the Droid has been available the Android OS has suddenly amassed 20% of the mobile internet traffic in the US.
RIM, which is the DOS of mobileInternet, is watching its awkward mobile traffic share swirl down the drain. One could reasonably guess that the market caps of the trailing providers will follow.
Palm, the inventor of the space, will likely be gone in a very short while. It’s sad as it is a once great company that made understandable wrong turns.
Microsoft is so busy competing in a raft of worlds that it perhaps did not determine that only one path mattered; mobile. They can lose the living room and even the server room but mobile was a must win. And in years of OS (CE, Mobile, etc.) releases they never seemed to be able to envision the endless vista that mobile truly represents.
What matters is that for anyone looking at mobile development the paths will have to be bifurcated. Releasing apps for one world won’t be enough anymore…and we have yet to release even one. To find the world changing so quickly, even before entering the game is a frightening prospect from an enterprise planning point of view. I cling to the hope that where change is fastest is also where opportunity is greatest.
Two billion downloads. You can’ t really say that enough. It’s hard to appreciate the magnitude. Most of my life growing up I watched the Mcdonald’s sign change from 10 Million Hamburgers Sold to 100 million and finally a billion. Then one day they gave up and just said, billions of hamburgers sold…but that took me from the 70s to the 90s. And yet Apple served up two billion iPhone apps in less than a year. It can’t be overstated, this is the fastest consumer growth the world has ever seen. It’s amazing.
