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Remember when you first saw the web…? Whether it was a Star Trek page that listed every episode or a dot matrix print out of a naked woman…either way it was something really new in Norwich, Vt/Hanover, N.H. and we couldn’t get enough of it. I immersed myself in Tektronix screens and dotmatrix printers from when I was about eight until I pulled my head out of my iPad three hours ago and saw the striking similarities of web creation all over again only this time with most of the problems solved; portability, not hot to the touch with masses of loud whirring fans, privacy for data entry and storage and and…it’s instant-on. I can’t over-state how cool it is for a computer to come to life instantly and be happy to being searching at your beck and call. Oh Thank You! I’ve been waiting since I first ran a paper tape through a PDP-9 for a computer that at least kept up with my typing. The IBM Selectric still wins on that.

But the iPad, damn is it different. But like any new form of soon to be mass accepted computing it will go through these types of iterations only this time instead of ten to fifteen years it will happen in three. And in those next three years  you will see rocket ships of success and epic failures of old guard companies that couldn’t fathom the light-speed changes that will be thrust upon them by consumer demand and not by Apple‘s creation. Apple has merely created the chalk board. The people will sketch out the story. The wealth destruction will be massive and most company’s won’t see the bullet that hits them. And this comes from an entrepreneur who once started a newspaper company. I’d sooner  own BP’s marketing department. (just kidding)

1. Content creation and consumption. Apple has given us cool new tools to envision digital imagery and sound and space and all of the meta around and between. And the first period will be filled with Ginsbergian exploration as the the walls of this new space are defined and redefined. The content will be overflowing with coolness. Each day new apps filled with wonder, doing things that took us forever to accomplish before. But now not only will we fill our grocery lists quickly but now they will be styled by a brilliant UX person who knows that all dairy belongs together and that your family’s consumption is going to stay within a gallon of the previous week. Smart content, beautifully laid out will lead to page consumption rates that are are unheard of in the wild west of www3.

2. The engine behind the web is always community. People forget this too easily and believe that Moore’s law is an engineering principle relating to processor doubling. Instead it is a law about the power of what happen when at the end of a limitless number of keyboards….Whoopsie, I meant Metcalfe’s law. Those brainiacs are so fussy when you get it wrong. Metcalfe said something to the effect that the network is exponentially more powerful with each additional node. That’s a tough nut to swallow. It’s strains my brain to think that each new netbook in Alabama makes the Internet exponentially more powerful. But I probably didn’t understand the principle. I do believe that each time you attach wetware to the network (smart people) that are far faster, self-educating, adjustable, scalable and increases in strength and numbers forever, the webs power to change the world remains exponential.

The power of the web has always been community. It was sad to see Sun come so close, “the network is the computer”….no, no, no. The network with the people are the application. A computer is boring. An application is endlessly fascinating.

3. Transaction – It is inevitable when you make the largest marketplace people will trade. The platforms/stores/entities will evolve. Prices will come down, liquidity in the system will increase and our economy will move faster. A faster economy, is, as Adam Smith told us  a better and richer economy.

4. But then a beautiful thing will happen. The merchants, marketers, branders and the rest will be held at abeyance; based on the quality of what they have made. And products poorly made or poorly described through crappy images or “All your base are belong to us” cultural incoherency will fail. Because the indescribably beautiful collision of community and commerce will lead to the right product at the right time at the right price. Community content and endless honesty about quantity on hand and and review quality will make the good etailer succeed and the shoddy ones drift out of business like so many hot dog vendors who quietly spew salmonilla in the ally’s away from the light of honest commerce. People who have been trying to unethically garner the consumers dollars for years through the spam cannon of endless informercials will find it harder in the face of real-time customer generated content. Now the retailer is held to the highest standard…that of the collected wisdom of all customers. The age is here and it’s merely been helped along by Steve Jobs making computing more collaborative and communal and capable. Thanks Steve. We’ll do our best to live up to it.

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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.

At least I’m hoping that.

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And Chris Dixon, my new hero, recently mentions that the place to advertise is on the sites with the highest purchasing intent and then made some half-hearted suggestions around that without touching on the next real source of advertising revenue: The e-tailer.

Lets face it. Conversion has never been anywhere near where we think it should be. For politeness we’ll say that across the web 95% of browsers don’t convert. So we pay for 100% of visitors and get 5% of sales. That’s a mighty hard business to run. But if you begin both the habit of advertising where your customer is almost ready to buy, a competing etailer in your category, and you sell advertising to your competitors in the same way, it may happen that we create a layer of places that convert better for both sides. The vendors would do well to buy traffic from their retailers and yet still send or sell them as much traffic as they can. Our customers need whatever content they need in order to be comfortable to buy. Your site may have it for one type of customer but not for another.

We don’t know why people don’t buy the way they do in the offline world. But we can get one beat closer by selling and buying advertising nearest the heart of the purchase. It isn’t insane if it converts, both ways.

We may well find a new gold mine of advertising that goes many directions and yet raises nice high margin dollars. And even learn why we don’t convert at the rate we’d like.

Eventually the etailer, with its superior and unbiase customer content may find itself more as the central traffic source for quality traffic than as conversion vehicle. Wouldn’t that be funny.

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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:

1. Ecommerce will shift toward home and couch and bed, from primarily work.
2. The iPad will succeed
3. Netflix is going to kill on the iPad.
4. 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.
5. 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
6. 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.

Thanks Steve…it’s brilliant.

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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.

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Every since AOL spammed the planet with discs, et al. there has been an never-ending strata of web users who just can’t seem to get the simplest aspects of the web. I’m not sure if people have stopped explaining it to them or if these things are real stumpers. I’ll try to clarify. It’s not that I have extra knowledge, I failed algebra four times in college. There are plenty of simple things that I just can’t get the hang of, like shoe-laces and brussel sprouts.

For the web stragglers, here are a few simple things:

1. Facebook‘s message queue is not email. Really. It can forward to email for some. But for many of us Facebook is kind of losing it’s appeal. So I never check the message queue. Yet my siblings write away as if my email address has in some way changed. It’s just another private message system, no better than the one at Ebay.com. Worse actually, Mom doesn’t write me at Ebay and the get teary-eyed when I don’t respond.

2. The navigation bar and Google‘s search input are separate things. Really. You can type a company’s domain (company name) in the navigation bar and press enter, and skip the step of typing it into the Google search field and then clicking their number one paid result. Save the world some money and save you time.

3. Etsy is the new Ebay. Sorry Ebay. You had it all for so long and we all miss you.

4. Never reveal anything on Facebook or a blog that you wouldn’t happily chat about with your manager or someone who you may have to interview with someday. In fact, don’t say anything to anyone that you wouldn’t like to share on TMZ or some such thing.

5. Give Your Child a Pseudonym: He or she deserves an ability to make mistakes and have them photographed or videoed and yet not connected with their real name for the rest of their life. We all did things when we were younger that we wouldn’t want to have on Facebook now…at least I did.

6. Internet is to the mobile internet as silent film is to TV.

7. www is dead. Long live direct navigation. When you are typing www before an address your just trying to be old school.  and away from specialization was just wrong. And I wish I could fix it immediately.

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They launched the sixty second smart phone app that wil allow you to have any product for sale in sixty seconds, including photos. This may be the coming of the seccond age. All hail Ebay.

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