Category Archives: Apple

iPad=AOL Release 2: computing for couch potatoes

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Revealing post from the Columbia Journalism review about the WSJ and NYT Apps on the iPad. The author finds it “worrisome” (quaint word) that the two papers “think they can partially return to the cloistered existence of the pre-Web days. That’s clearly a mistake.”

Yep!

One big missing feature in the WSJ and NYT iPad apps: You can’t copy text. Take a screen cap[ture] of it all you want, but you can’t get the actual text. That’s a basic function on a computer, and the iPad has a clever cut-and-paste function, but it doesn’t work here.

That would seem to be a conscious decision and not just a missing feature in these quasi-beta apps. If so it will make it hard to blog or email about a story. Of course, it will also make it harder for people to rip off whole stories on splogs, and it could lesson the relevance of aggregators.

Neither paper embeds links in their stories. While nytimes.com links to a U.S. embassy news release in the third paragraph of its Pakistan attack story today, the Times app has no links.

It’s also worth noting that you can’t comment on stories in either the Journal or Times apps.

The absence of these features is not accidental. Forward to the past.

LATER: Gosh! The steam media crowd still don’t get it:

Three days into the Apple iPad’s launch, many magazine customers are embracing the new format for print but howling over what they consider excessive prices for single issues.

“Come on, guys, help us help you,” read one typical customer comment, on Apple’s iTunes store, in response to Popular Science’s iPad app. The app, a digital replica of the monthly magazine, is priced at $4.99 per single issue, the same as the print. “… This is the future of magazines. This is how I want all of my magazines. But I will not pay $5 per issue.”

Magazines are pinning their hopes on the iPad and other, forthcoming tablets and e-readers helping offset a decline in circulation and ad revenue. But as the early feedback shows, they may be paying the price for the industry’s longstanding practice of charging steep discounts for subscriptions. As a result, consumers are well aware of the per-issue discrepancy between subscriptions and single issues.

As one customer of Time magazine’s app ($4.99 single issue) wrote, “Not to put too fine a point on it, but they’re … passing the savings on distribution and raw materials to themselves. I can get 56 issues of the paper version for $20. How am I supposed to feel about this?”

Making matters worse, some customers of magazine apps thought they were downloading a subscription when what they got was a single issue. (To date, magazines that are sold through Apple’s app store are available on a single-copy basis only, although publishers said their titles would be available on a subscription basis in the coming weeks.)

Common sense and the iPad

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Dave Winer is one of the wisest people on the Net, so I was wondering what he thinks of the iPad. Here are his initial thoughts. They make sense to me.

It’s definitely not a writing tool. Out of the question. This concerns Jeff Jarvis, rightly so. This is something my mother observed when I demoed it to her on Saturday. Howard xxx writes that not everyone is a writer. True enough, and not everyone is a voter either, but we want to make it very easy for people to vote. And not everyone does jury duty, but we require it. Writing is important. And experience has shown that the winning computer platforms are the ones you can develop for on the computer itself, and the ones that require other, more expensive hardware and software, don’t become platforms. There are exceptions but it’s remarkable how often it works this way.

Most of this is negative, and it reflects my feeling about the iPad, which is generally negative, even though I have a lot of fun discovering the problems with the device. It feels so nice to use. It’s so pretty and the nice touches are so incredibly nice. I like using it the way I like driving my BMW.

And the battery performance is astounding. Apple, who seemed never to understand how important battery life is, has achieved it. My iPad still has 44% of its battery left after flying with me across the country, in use the whole time, and on the train trip from the airport, and reading the news this morning at breakfast. That's remarkable, not for Apple, but in comparison to the netbook that I admire for its battery life.

Further, in the iPad’s favor — the screen is uncluttered with the 30-year history of personal computer development, and my netbook screen is. As a result, even though the netbook has a slightly larger screen, the iPad feels larger, and effectively is larger. That’s why the map application feels so much bigger and more useful, because it has more screen real estate to play with. But this comes at a substantial cost. There is lots of missing important functionality. And even where the functionality is present, it's hard to find, and because it works differently makes it hard to use both the netbook and the iPad. And I believe that, for me, the netbook will win, for a variety of reasons…

The iPad and the CD-ROM

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Lovely post by Danny O’Brien.

For those of you blessed with senile amnesia or youth, CD-ROMs were the first wave of “interactive media” in the mid-eighties, and the great hope for publishing houses struggling to understand what they might be doing in the 21st century. Companies from Dorling-Kindersley to News Corp threw millions into CD-ROM publishing, with very little ultimate return. They’d do some fancy-schmancy David Bowie joint project, or an incredibly complex animated re-working of their existing bestsellers. Each one won more awards than it sold copies, and eventually those “interactive divisions” were rolled into the “online media” departments, where their designers would get drunk and bitter, until one night they were sacked after uploading 640MB Adobe Director files onto the website front page.

Back then, geeks were unused to other industry sectors barging into our little rustic byte farmyards with their fancy suits and corporate expense accounts, braying triumphantly about digital convergence, and then, seconds later, striding into the business-model threshing machine that thrummed in the corner. We did not know then that there was a queue of people like this, waiting to dance past us into the bloody knives. We watched their cockiness with alarm, not with the disdain that would come later and definitely not with own brand of hubristic Internet rockstar smugness, the smugness that tempts us all to look a bit less closely at ourselves, and a bit more closely at that thresher.

No, back then it was all a bit shocking. We assumed these people knew what they were doing.

This is a very sharp essay. His point is that developing iPad Apps is one thing, but making them into sustainable income-generators is quite another.

I know that publishing companies will be tempted to go for the all-singing, all-dancing iPad application. But what they’re doing that, my suspicion is that what they’re aiming for is a product which exudes credibility, status — an aura of a professional media product. And when you’re spending the kind of money that a professional application requires, solely to improves your status in the world, you’re not selling a product, you’re buying the love of your audience. That may be an investment in credibility, but it’s not an incoming revenue stream.

The goldrush economics of the iPad will hide this for a little while, because everything will be briefly profitable. But to be sustainable, you need to either be producing something that consistently costs you less than it earns, or will produce regular super-hits among a string of drabber products, or just makes you so much money in its first few months that you never need work again. You can’t just make some single wonderful shiny demo product. You need to keep producing them; you need some way of economizing that process. And you need to stop others from making their shiny thing cheaper than, yet interchangeable with, yours. Otherwise you’re just throwing nice fancy gee-gaws into the thresher’s hungry mouth.

P-day arrives

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Stand by for TV news footage of the faithful queueing outside Apple stores in the US. It’ll be like the iPhone all over again. Or will it?.

“The first five million will be sold in a heartbeat,” said Guy Kawasaki, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur who was a marketing executive at Apple in the 1980s. “But let’s see: you can’t make a phone call with it, you can’t take a picture with it, and you have to buy content that before now you were not willing to pay for. That seems tough to me.”

Apple and other technology companies that are introducing a wave of touch-screen tablets face an ambitious challenge. The industry wants to create a market for a new type of device that most people do not really need — or do not yet know they need.

Tablets are intended to allow people to watch video, browse the Web, play video games and read books, magazines and newspapers everywhere they go without the bulky inconveniences of a full-fledged laptop.

The people who have already ordered an iPad or will show up at the Apple store on Saturday “are technophiles — the phrase ‘leading-edge technology’ sends goosebumps all over their skin,” said Eitan Muller, a professor of high-tech marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business.

But those people make up only 16 percent of the total potential market for the iPad, Professor Muller said. “The main market is made up of pragmatists, and the same phrase sends them into convulsions.”

My hunch is that those people who already have iPod Touch devices will be the hardest to convince. Either way, Apple’s big bet is that the iPad can create an entirely new market niche between smartphone and netbook.

Which brings to mind James Surowiecki’s thoughtful piece in the New Yorker recently about the way the market for devices has evolved. Here’s the nub of his argument:

For Apple, which has enjoyed enormous success in recent years, “build it and they will pay” is business as usual. But it’s not a universal business truth. On the contrary, companies like Ikea, H. & M., and the makers of the Flip video camera are flourishing not by selling products or services that are “far better” than anyone else’s but by selling things that aren’t bad and cost a lot less. These products are much better than the cheap stuff you used to buy at Woolworth, and they tend to be appealingly styled, but, unlike Apple, the companies aren’t trying to build the best mousetrap out there. Instead, they’re engaged in what Wired recently christened the “good-enough revolution.” For them, the key to success isn’t excellence. It’s well-priced adequacy.

These two strategies may look completely different, but they have one crucial thing in common: they don’t target the amorphous blob of consumers who make up the middle of the market. Paradoxically, ignoring these people has turned out to be a great way of getting lots of customers, because, in many businesses, high- and low-end producers are taking more and more of the market. In fashion, both H. & M. and Hermès have prospered during the recession. In the auto industry, luxury-car sales, though initially hurt by the downturn, are reemerging as one of the most profitable segments of the market, even as small cars like the Ford Focus are luring consumers into showrooms. And, in the computer business, the Taiwanese company Acer has become a dominant player by making cheap, reasonably good laptops—the reverse of Apple’s premium-price approach.

While the high and low ends are thriving, the middle of the market is in trouble.

Very perceptive IMHO.

Sad but true: the iPad won’t save the magazine industry

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Insightful piece by Rory Maher.

Some believe the iPad will enable magazines to reverse course in the near-term, but we believe these expectations are way off the mark. In particular:

* It’s going to be years for mobile ad revenue to become material.

* As a result, in the near-term magazines will need to look to subscription revenue to drive incremental profits.

* But, even if iPad sales wildly exceed expectations and users rush to purchase lots of magazine subscriptions (we don’t think they will), this will not be enough to drive meaningful revenue at most magazines.

He does some calculations, based on assumptions that :

* iPad owners are early-adopters that consume a lot of content so let’s say 50% of them subscribe to two iPad magazines each.
* Magazine subscriptions on the iPad are higher than print subscriptions (most magazines plan to charge more initially), so assume an average $15 per monthly subscription.

His conclusion:

Even if iPad sales soar past expectations and reach, say, 16 million units over the next two years total magazine subscription revenue would equal about $2.8 billion per year under the above case scenario. That’s less than 30% of annual circulation revenue for the entire magazine industry and only about 10% of overall industry revenue (circulation + advertising).

Sobering but true. As Derek Thompson points out in The Atlantic:

It’s useful to step back and consider the long game for publishers. Magazines get money from (1) readers and (2) advertisers looking for readers. The problem today isn’t the readers, who are all over the Internet. It’s the ads. Magazine advertising has slipped in the last two years by 12%. Nobody expects print ads to rebound to their early 2000s levels, and everybody is still waiting for That Big Idea that helps publishers monetize their online content. Maybe it comes from location-based ads. Maybe it comes from cross-publisher partnerships and a Netflix model that bundles magazine subscriptions and distributes them electronically to computers and e-readers. Nobody knows.

But this is the key to the story: magazines are losing ad revenue, but they’re not losing readers. In fact most of them are gaining readers — they’re just gaining them online, where our eyeballs are poorly monetized. All publishers really want is a platform where they can charge readers for reading. The iPad gives them that opportunity. It’s fair to say publishers are being overly-optimistic with their prices for iPad apps. It’s not fair to say they’re wrong for trying.

The basic problem, I suspect, is that the traditional print newspaper and magazine businesses were cash cows for so many generations that those who were conditioned in them simply cannot conceive of a future in which returns are much more modest. They grew up in a world where a TV franchise or a big newspaper or magazine brand was a licence to print money. There is a future for journalism and publishing, but it’s one in which companies work harder, smarter and in much more diverse ways. And for lower margins.

Cloud computing: the carbon footprint

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In an astute move, Greenpeace is capitalising on iPad frenzy by launching a new report into the carbon footprint of cloud computing.

Make IT Green: Cloud Computing and its Contribution to Climate Change shows how the launch of quintessential cloud computing devices like the Apple iPad, which offer users access to the ‘cloud’ of online services like social networks and video streaming, can contribute to a much larger carbon footprint of the Information Technology (IT) sector than previously estimated.

To be clear: We are not picking on Apple. We are not dissing the iPad. But maybe someone can come up with an app that calculates the carbon footprint of using different web sites based on their location and energy deals. Apple is the master of promotion, and while we marvel at the sleek unpolluted design of the iPad, we need to think about where this is all leading and how like all good surfers we can make sure our environment stays clean and green.

The report builds on previous industry research and shows that at current growth rates data centers and telecommunication networks will consume about 1,963 billion kilowatt hours of electricity in 2020. That is more than triple their current consumption and more than the current electricity consumption of France, Germany, Canada and Brazil combined. However, the report also shows how IT can avert climate chaos by becoming a transformative force advocating for solutions that increase the use of renewable energy.

The Register has a helpful summary of the report which also highlights an interesting difference between Apple and Google as cloud proprietors:

Apple’s $1bn data center in Catawba County, North Carolina, currently under construction, will get its energy from a local electrical grid that contains only 3.8 per cent renewable energy, and a full 50.5 per cent from dirty ol’ coal and 38.7 per cent from nasty nukes. Google’s data center in The Dalles, Oregon, by contrast, gets 50.9 per cent of its juice from renewable sources, according to Greenpeace.

Greenpeace is also pretty critical of Facebook’s carbon footprint.

The only thing you really need to know about the iPad

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From David Pogue’s Review.

The iPad is not a laptop. It’s not nearly as good for creating stuff. On the other hand, it’s infinitely more convenient for consuming it — books, music, video, photos, Web, e-mail and so on. For most people, manipulating these digital materials directly by touching them is a completely new experience — and a deeply satisfying one.

His iPad ran for twelve hours playing continuous video.

Kleiner Perkins doubles its bets on Apps

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The thing that convinced me that the iPhone was a game-changer was the announcement in 2008 by John Doerr, the world’s smartest venture capitalist, that his firm was setting up a $100 million investment fund for Apps developers. Now, with the iPad looming, his firm has announced that it’s doubling its bets on Apps technology.

MENLO PARK, California, March 31, 2010 – Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers (KPCB) today announced the doubling of its iFund to $200 million of venture capital for applications for Apple’s revolutionary iPhone OS family of products, including iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad. Established in 2008 as a $100 million investment pool, the original iFund is now fully committed across 14 companies. iFund companies have been supported by an additional $330 million from follow-on investors.

KPCB also announced iFund-supported companies have more than 20 applications in development for the soon-to-be-released iPad, with 11 available at first ship on April 3. KPCB noted the iPhone has created an inflection in mobile content consumption and the iPad will lead the next wave of innovation in mobile computing. The iFund is increasing its investment dollars to back entrepreneurs and build companies that focus on these areas. Particular areas of interest on iPad include entertainment, communication, social networking, commerce, health care, and education.

“Welcome to the brave new post-PC era where a swoosh of fluidity replaces the traditional mouse-bound GUI. A new, truly revolutionary platform is rare, and a prize for entrepreneurs,” said John Doerr, KPCB Partner. “We expect all ventures to have an iPad strategy. We will fund many more ventures for iPad, and the iFund will accelerate their success.”

The firm thinks that the first $100 million was well spent. The claimed results for companies it has backed include:

  • Over $100 million of 2010 mobile revenue
  • Over 100 million aggregate mobile downloads
  • 18 titles by investees reached the Top 10 on the App Store.

    • Steady on, boy, steady on

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    The CEO of salesforce.com has been drinking the Kool-Aid:

    The future of our industry now looks totally different than the past. It looks like a sheet of paper, and it’s called the iPad. It’s not about typing or clicking; it’s about touching. It’s not about text, or even animation, it’s about video. It’s not about a local disk, or even a desktop, it’s about the cloud. It’s not about pulling information; it’s about push. It’s not about repurposing old software, it’s about writing everything from scratch (because you want to take advantage of the awesome potential of the new computers and the new cloud—and because you have to reach this pinnacle). Finally, the industry is fun again.

    Last week I gave presentations to more than 60 CIOs in various meetings throughout America’s heartland. My message to them: We are moving from Cloud 1 to Cloud 2, and the iPad is the accelerator. Many of them haven’t even made it to Cloud 1—some are still on mainframes. They are working on MVS/CICS, or Lotus Notes, and they have never heard of Cocoa, or even that there is now HTML 5. This is unacceptable. The next generation is here. The iPad that shows us what now is really possible—and that we all need to go faster. Unfortunately, some CIOs would rather retire than go faster.

    Cloud 1 ————————————->Cloud 2

    Type/Click———————————->Touch
    Yahoo/Amazon—————————–>Facebook
    Tabs——————————————>Feeds
    Chat——————————————>Video
    Pull——————————————->Push
    Create—————————————->Consume
    Location Unknown————————->Location Known
    Desktop/notebook————————->Smart phone/Tablet
    Windows/Mac——————————>Cocoa/HTML 5

    What’s most exciting is that this fundamental transformation—cloud + social + iPad—will inspire a new generation of wildly innovative new apps that will change entire industries. Take health. We have all been waiting for the health application that will revolutionize how we share and communicate with our doctors, and help us make better health care decisions. The apps we have seen as first generation EHR/PHR just have not cut it, and now with ObamaCare there is no killer app to accelerate through the new EHR reimbursement program. The shift ignited by the iPad will allow the proliferation of these new missing apps, and automate the industries and professionals left behind by the last generation of technology. Now, no industry will be left behind.