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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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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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 mobile Internet, 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.

It’s a two horse race now, Android vs. iPhone. It’s important not to understate that apple has created the fastest consumer technology growth ramp the world has ever seen. But Android is much closer than I thought was conceivable.

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.

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What I hadn’t realized when I got the Droid is that market economics don’t apply. You don’t have a customer in the Verizon store comparing the heft of the iPhone and the Droid and saying, “hey, nice, if worse comes to worse I could cudgel a would be attacker to death with this five pounds O’Droid.

What I mean is that people are so fooled by their wireless contracts or about the disinformation about network superiority or inferiority that they aren’t doing true comparison shopping. I picture Tina Turner, again from Mad Max saying to people at Verizon stores, “You know the story, Bust the Deal, Face the Wheel!”  And those people, white as ghosts from fear and from being relentless geeks with 80 plus hours a week of laptop tans, subsuming their will and instead of walking out the door and going and buying an easily superior product in the iPhone, instead saying, “what do you have that’s iPhone-ish?” I mean we all saw how Clark Griswold ended up with the coveted Family Truckster.

And that I get. After two years of pent up geek demand as they steadfastly didn’t give in to apple the Verizon faithful are going to line up long and deep and keep the factories Wii busy for ages to come. And we will have an actual two horse race for a little while.

And so my believe is that la familia, mi cosa nostra…etc. have a super hit on their hands. The mafia like entities Verizon and Motorola coming together to craft a blood oath under a waxingg moon with the naive Google is laughably funny. If you’re Google. See the old men from Schaumberg will do okay but somehow Verizon got tricked into being a dumb pipe again. Ouch.

If you read the best article on the wireless landscape in years, by Bill Gurley, he espouses a notion of Less Than Free and it’s powerful. When you look at the Droid you see Google taggers hammered the place. You can’t take a morning constitutional without the Droid scouring google for words like loamy or brown. Google is so deeply integrated into the Droid that they have uncorked the largeest champagne bottle of clicks, searches and paid clicks since Bill Gross first invented this little idea at a company known as GoTo.com.

Well played Google. Y’seee Verizon and Motorola…they can dance this dance again with anyone they like. There are lots of hardward vendors. And Verizon your right to dip your toe in the click stream was the play…but you didn’t make it. You made like the record companies not knowing that Apple was using you to sell iPods and create an ecosystem. And now Google has played the telcos in order to lift the cap off of their market cap. Double in 24-36 months. Nice work Sergey, Nice Larry.

Lets see how well you play the trust busters when the game next changes. B-Gates is still ahead of you there.

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Apple‘s iPhone strategy has been the most beautiful business ramp in the history of technology. The OS is, despite some minor flaws, excellent. A year ago it became the one material possession I would save with me if there was a fire (pardon the duh factor of grabbing a phone). In the past my laptop was my most vital possession and yet quickly my iPhone has supplanted. Yet convergence is just as far in the distance as it ever was. I use my laptop just as many hours a day…it’s just the the iPhone has eaten up all the space that comes between. Even a pause in conversation is enough to have me idly unlocking the phone, considering a spin through the app store.  Divergence is alive and well as it always has been.

Much of the business world is still grappling with what kind of opportunity the iPhone really represents. Often the thinking goes that mCommerce should be like the Tommy Hilfiger web model. I believe that is the wrong tack, taking traditional eCommerce and just shrinking it to a smaller form factor.

What needs to exist is the notion mobile is leading us to a new model for computing that I’ll call for the moment, Better than Web.

Better Than Web is, well, just like it sounds. eTailing always runs a few years behind the content revolution and generally  also just doesn’t do things as beautifully. There isn’t an ecommerce site in the world that has anything like Facebook’s beautiful UI and phenomenally layered business logic. I dream of an eTailer that hits even 70 percent of the Facebook mark.

And in the world of Apps the gap between the A players and the eTailers is larger. I have yet to se

e an etail example using GPS, shared browsing, haptic interface, audio, accelerometer and more. With GPS, turn by turn navigation and some simple work Walmart could have every one of their store’s guide you through a real map your current stadium like store. Add a list function and it could walk you to each product you need while offering you coupons on nearby or similar items. Average cart could climb and time in store could go down. Need a clerk. Hit the big panic button and scan the bar code and have an instant call back…from the call center in Mumbai.

And for us rare pureplays the world just gets rosier. Show only reviews from my state, current location, in the last fifteen minutes, from my friends, etc. No longer need a person in Naples Florida be greeted by puffy down coats on the homepage. We could actually personalize. If it’s a ski site like ours and we’re able to track vertical skied in one day then we would know much better what skis to recommend.

Simply put, in eTailing your retail App better not be a slimmed down dimmer retail store with itty pictures that works in conjunction with your web site. It instead needs to be the next generation or etailing offer much much more. The move to dynamic localized and personalized content just moved up a few years. Ebay is averaging $89.95 per download in revenue and we haven’t even hit the holidays. Mobile is the future of etailing, duh. And Better Than Web is the future of mobile.

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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.

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