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Archive for January, 2010

My daily readings 01/31/2010

January 31, 2010

Resist the urge to punish everyone for one person’s mistake | Derek Sivers

tags: Startup, management
- As a business owner, when you get screwed-over by someone, it’s tempting to make a big grand policy you think will prevent you from ever getting screwed-over again.
  
  One employee can’t focus, and spends their time surfing the ‘net. Instead of just firing or reassigning that person to more challenging work, the company installs an expensive content-approving firewall so that nobody can go to unapproved sites ever again.
  
  One thief used a stolen credit card to make a purchase. Instead of acknowledging that was one out of 100,000 honest orders, the company makes all future customers fax a copy of their card and ID and wait days for verification.
  
  It’s important to resist that simplistic, angry, reactionary urge to punish everyone, and step back to look at the big picture.
Ramble On » iPad – is it what education needs?

tags: iPad, education
- The ‘tablet’ form factor is ideally suited to education. Ever since Microsoft released the first Tablet PC it’s been clear to many in education that this interface was the answer to many of our needs. Unfortunately, Windows and the applications it runs, has never fulfilled the promise. Maybe Apple can provide us with the answer.
- My first reaction to the iPad was the device when combined with the iBook store and iTunesU, would make the product attractive to Education. But now I’ve had time to think about it, I’m not sure if Apple has developed a product that will (just now) make massive inroads into (UK) Higher Education.
- Whether it’s taking notes in class, using it in group work or even as a data recorder in a lab, the form factor and the instant access to research materials and our core systems through Safari is perfect in so many ways.
- When students are required to buy texts, they shop around or buy second hand copies from students who studied last year. Apple appear to be positioning the device as the front-end to purchasable content. The iBook store will undoubtably be a massive success, but it’s design appears to be centred around content you intend to keep.
- But we already have a definite need for a good tablet, maybe in addition to their main laptop, because University staff have to mark assignments. Something as simple as marking paper submissions has proven to be significantly slower, when staff have to mark electronically. Last year we accepted over 80,000 electronic submissions, this year’s it’s likely to be double that amount. Within 5 years, I think all submissions will be electronic. So we’re desperate for a product with an interface that streamlines the marking workflow.
- Most staff use the pen to add comments next to student’s mistakes and the iPhone’s cut and paste mechanism demonstrates how easy it is to highlight sections with your finger. So adding inline comments should be pretty easy.
Gowalla Opens Trips To All. A Simple Way To Organize Pub Crawls.

tags: iPhone, Geo
Wired Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education

tags: iPad, education
- But wait — it might be time to take a deep breath to let the excitement of the sales pitch fade. Tablets have been tried before, with similar fanfare, and have fallen flat. And so far e-textbook sales are growing more slowly than expected. And even Apple doesn’t always hit big with new products (the Newton personal organizer being its most famous flop). Even the institution considering a give-away, Abilene Christian University, said it will have to play around with the devices before making a decision. “We didn’t want to jump blindly into something we don’t know about,” said William Rankin, director of educational innovation at the university.
- Apple’s leader and chief pitch-man, Steve Jobs, listed plenty of uses for the new gadget at an event announcing the iPad in San Francisco, which some bloggers streamed online — but a vision of their use in education was not explicitly outlined. Mr. Jobs did mention iTunesU twice when listing the kinds of content that could be viewed on the iPad, referring to the company’s partnership with many colleges to offer them free space for multimedia content like lecture recordings. But he otherwise focused on consumer uses — watching movies, viewing photos, sending e-mail messages, and reading novels published by five trade publishers mentioned at the event. That does not mean that the company won’t later promote the iPad’s use on campuses, though, since it waited until after iPods and iPhones were established before beginning to work more heavily with colleges to promote those in education.
- One reason is that students do not know about the option, said Eric Weil, of Student Monitor. “We still have a relatively low level of awareness that there’s such a thing as the e-textbook,” he said.
- Ms. Hinds sees Apple’s cachet and “cool” factor as being another lure that will get students to try e-textbooks. “They are market-makers,” she said of Apple. “And higher education is ready for some game-changing.”
- CourseSmart, for example, recently released an iPhone app for its store, which sells more than 8,000 titles from the largest textbook publishers.
  
  Frank Lyman, executive vice president at CourseSmart, said he is excited about the iPad and other tablet-style computers because they may fit a student’s lifestyle better than full computers. He said that data from publishers shows that students do not carry their laptops with them to class, even though they are touted as portable. “They might do that with this kind of device because it’s smaller,” he said. “At the end of the day it comes down to not just can I take it with me, but am I happy to take it with me?”
- That’s the view of Mr. Rankin, of Abilene Christian, which for several years has given free iPhones or iPod Touch devices to every first-year student, so that nearly every student on the campus has one. The iPad offers many of the same features, but with a larger screen that could make more classroom uses possible, he said. “We’re very excited about this device,” he said, because it’s big enough and robust enough to create content, not just consume it.
- He also pointed out that several PC manufacturers have sold tablet computers before, which have been tried enthusiastically in classrooms. Their promise is that they make it easy for professors to walk around classrooms while holding the computer, while allowing them to wirelessly project information to a screen at the front of the room. But despite initial hype, very few PC tablets are being used in college classrooms, he said.
  
  Now that Apple’s long-awaited secret is out, the harder questions might be whether the iPad is the long-awaited education computer.
Hacker News | IPad UI Roundup

tags: iPad, app
- The Omni Group announced they are working on Omni Graffle for the iPad. To me this is a killer app. A great example of where a desktop application would actually be better on the iPad than the desktop.
- If Omni can put it all into an easily-browsed “notebook” format, that might just convince me to get an iPad.
  This is the first idea that actually has me considering it.
Fraser Speirs – Blog – Future Shock

tags: iPad
- What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.
  
  For years we’ve all held to the belief that computing had to be made simpler for the ‘average person’. I find it difficult to come to any conclusion other than that we have totally failed in this effort.
  
  Secretly, I suspect, we technologists quite liked the idea that Normals would be dependent on us for our technological shamanism. Those incantations that only we can perform to heal their computers, those oracular proclamations that we make over the future and the blessings we bestow on purchasing choices.
  
  Ask yourself this: in what other walk of life do grown adults depend on other people to help them buy something? Women often turn to men to help them purchase a car but that’s because of the obnoxious misogyny of car dealers, not because ladies worry that the car they buy won’t work on their local roads. (Sorry computer/car analogy. My bad.)
- It’s not. The Real Work is not formatting the margins, installing the printer driver, uploading the document, finishing the PowerPoint slides, running the software update or reinstalling the OS.
  
  The Real Work is teaching the child, healing the patient, selling the house, logging the road defects, fixing the car at the roadside, capturing the table’s order, designing the house and organising the party.
  
  Think of the millions of hours of human effort spent on preventing and recovering from the problems caused by completely open computer systems. Think of the lengths that people have gone to in order to acquire skills that are orthogonal to their core interests and their job, just so they can get their job done.
- I totally agree. We witnessed on the 27th a step up to the next computing platform for the masses (albeit some may want to state an infant step, personally I think the step is much larger). Over the next 10-20 years we will see computing evolution based on this single event I’m sure.
- The iPad is the start of useable computing.
- I’ve been saying to people around me for years that computers are just not ready for daily use by ordinary people; they are not reliable or secure or even easy enough to understand. It has been very interesting to watch the iPhone progress and see it actually become the best way to achieve certain ends, even if you already own a laptop of some kind. I think you’ve expressed this thinking really well, thanks for writing this up.
- Spot on. 50 years ago you needed a degree in mechanics to own and drive a car. You needed to know all the inner workings just to get it to work. Today, 99.9% of car owners know know the first thing about the inner workings – because they don’t need to. It just works. I’ve driven 150,000 miles in mine and all I’ve done is changed the tyres.
  The iPad is the computer my mum will finally be able to use. It might not please 10,000 geeks, but it will please 100 million normal people.
The iPad Is Like Holding The Future. But Only Because I Graduated From iPhone School.

tags: iPad
- After the Apple event today, I got a chance to play with the new iPad for quite a bit of time. My takeaway? The thing is beautiful and fast. Really fast. If you’ll excuse my hyperbole, it felt like I was holding the future. But is it a must-have? That’s a complicated question.
  
  The quick and dirty answer is: for many people, right now, no. Unlike the iPhone, which filled an already well-established need (cellular telephone usage), there is no existing need the iPad fills. That is, unless you’re an iPhone or iPod touch user. If that’s the case, the iPad does fill a couple of needs — it’s the best way to use apps, and more importantly, the best way to browse the web in a style that is likely your preferred method: by touching it.
- Towards the end of his keynote, Steve Jobs alluded to this idea when he said that the 75 million iPhones and iPod touches that have already shipped ensure that those users will already know how to use the iPad. During the hands-on demos, two different Apple employees said basically the same thing. “If you have an iPhone, you already know how to use this,” one said.
- But the key point is that it only does the one thing (and those Kindle apps won’t help that much because the device is way too slow) — as many of us have long suspected, it’s going to be relegated to a feature of a device that does more. And that’s exactly what Apple is doing with the iPad (which we correctly translated Jobs as saying back in September when everyone else seemed to think he said he would never do anything with eBooks).
- The thing is, as a heavy iPhone user, I immediately recognize the iPad’s appeal. If it can perform anywhere close to the promised 10 hour battery life, I’ll likely ditch carrying around a laptop most of the time and simply take an iPad with the keyboard accessory. The thing is that snappy — and, at a pound and a half and a half-inch thick, the weight and size savings will be substantial. Oh, and at $30-a-month for unlimited data (yes, sadly through AT&T), I can ditch my $60-a-month laptop 3G card.
- What it comes down to for me is that when I don’t need to do something that’s typing-intensive (like writing), I’d much prefer to use my hands to move around applications and browse the web. The iPhone has taught me that. Meanwhile, the rapid movement of data to the cloud has taught me that I have next to no need for most desktop applications anymore. In other words, I’m perfectly primed for this device.
- The iPhone and the iPod touch have in a way served as training wheels for us to use this new type of device, the iPad. To a lesser extent, so have Apple’s multi-touch trackpads and the new multi-touch Magic Mouse. All of these devices are pointing towards what Apple obviously believes is the future of computing: touch. That is more clear now than ever before — the iPad is their biggest step yet.
- Allow me to explain using my life & computing needs as a business student:
  -Microsoft Office. Mac ports are good but not perfect. OneNote is great for taking notes in class and Excel on a Mac doesn’t compare at all.
  Currently my Acer Netbook serves this need. Ideally, I would also have a workstation at home (be it windows or an imac with bootcamp) for when I really want to sit down and pound things out.
  -Mobile needs include phoning, ability to jot down quick notes, simple web surfing and access to media, email and text messaging. Right now I use a combo of a blackberry pearl and my iPod.
  -Web surfing. When I’m not doing school work, I spend a lot of time surfing the Internet recreationally. This includes streaming video, blogs, newspaper articles, forums and general web surfing. Right now I switch between my netbook and my parent’s macbook to do this.
  —>This is where the tablet comes in. For casual web surfing I would prefer form factor. Often I’m not in the most comfortable position possible because I have to twist myself towards my laptop. I need a lightweight, intuitive tablet. Of course, most of us just don’t know that yet because it hasn’t been an option.
  
  smartphone + laptop/netbook + workstation
  and now, Tablet.
  
  They all satisfy slightly different needs. This is what Steve Jobs alluded to when he talked about product lines in his presentation. The iPad will be a success because it is sufficiently differentiated from all three.
  Remember, Apple’s a consumer company. This isn’t a heavy duty tablet for engineers, architects, artists and business users. It’s for relaxing on the couch. And it does that better:
  -iPod screen is too small
  -Laptops keyboards are somewhat cumbersome
  -And I don’t want to sit in my office
- I can’t wait to see the educational implications the iPad will have. Imagine these in the hands of 1st graders.
  
  Easy to use. Touch screen. Anyone can develop apps. It might not be a must to have but its still a game changer.
- I used to own a netbook (acer aspire one) that I bought for $399 some time back.
  
  Although it had most of the features you mention, I hated it because it was jack of all trades and master of none. I barely used the camera ever. I never in the 3 months I owned it had to use to output (it was VGA though) even once. Its wifi radio was sub-par. It tiny mouse was shitty as hell (let me not even get started on the bad mouse buttons). And, it barely had 3 hrs of charge. And, even though it had flash, I could barely watch movies on HULU because it couldnt handle high-def videos.
  
  If this tablet delivers even half the features it promises it does, it beats most of the netbooks out there.
  
  I agree that this this thing doesn’t have a freaking camera, for reasons I cannot even think of, and that it has no multi-tasking is a turn-off.. but for $499 it is a deal much better than any notebook can offer. Especially for college students like me who get blazing fast wifi all over the campus for free.
  
  Plus, I am hoping OS 4.0 will bring the background apps feature since they barely changed anything to the iPhone OS for the iPad.
- You don’t “need” it. You don’t need anything really… other than food & oxygen. But you want it. That’s key.
- The iPad would definitely kick your Asus Notebook’s ass bigtime. That’s why you would need one.
Top 10 Reasons The Apple iPad Will Put Amazon’s Kindle Out of Business

tags: iPad, kindle
- 3) The compatibility. iPad supports ePub out of the box, overcoming publishers’ resistance to having to support a proprietary format such as Kindle’s; and creating compatibility with books sold through a leading standard format through any channel. (Something tells me Amazon will be making an announcement about ePub support real soon…)
- 5) The experience. The Kindle provides a good functional experience for readers—in a very Bezosian way, it meets all our needs. But Apple’s creation goes beyond, to make the experience fun and cool. You can swipe through pages on an iPad. On the Kindle, you have to dutifully click a button.
- 7) The apps. In a digital age, a book is (finally!) becoming more than just words on a page. But the Kindle has been slow to recognize this.
- 9) The price. For $10 more than a Kindle DX, consumers get an incredible ebook reader, and so much more: a device that they can use for, well, pretty much anything. The options, consumer experience, and flexibility for that $10 are a no-brainer.
- It’s clear that Amazon is already scared: witness their recent moves in the last few days running up to Apple’s announcement. Just this month, they’ve announced an app framework and a new royalty structure to be more attractive to publishers – and both moves are clearly defensive catch-up plays to respond to the threat of the iPad. Amazon is even trying to win love by giving away free Kindles to their best customers.
- Plus the 10 hour battery life stinks for an ereader. If I take a trip I just want to pack my ereader and go. I don’t want to have to worry about packing a cord, finding an outlet, or bringing a power converter to charge it. I have to bring all those for my laptop why would I pack both.
  
  Give me at least 3 days of battery life, on battery life not standby. Then maybe I could at least take it on a weekend trip without concern.
  
  And as for it replacing my laptop on a trip, no way. I can’t do work on this, I can’t answer 50 emails in 30 minutes, I can’t edit Word documents, nor can I listen to pandora and work at the same time.
  
  Sorry, this is just a cool looking toy, but it serves no purpose.
- I am not Apple fanboy. I never had iPhone or Ipod touch. But i want to get iPad. The reason why:
  I am an engineering student. I read a loooooooot of color PDFs and i buy eTexbooks on Coursresmart, which has an app in the app store. I also could use some of the calculator apps…Plus i need portability and low weight. Both of wich iPad has.
  And if i can watch movies, browse internet, listen to the music – that is a big plus.
  
  In my opinion iPad will not be as popular as iPhone, but it will fill the “want”(not need) of the average consumer. And Apple created iPad precisely for an average consumer.
  
  Bottom line if you don’t like it, if it is not what u want – don’t buy it. But i will.
- This is about creating a new category of device that fills needs people didn’t even know they had.
  And Apple is very, very good at that.
  
  No, I’m not a fanboy. But I can recognize when someone creates a breakthrough device.
  
  Yes, it’s a 1.0 device – and it will surely only get better with future releases.
- However, some people (maybe a lot) will buy ipad, but IMO these will be a totally different kind of costumers. More the kind that wants the new gadget to show of (and because it’s fun to use).
  
  Then, apple will leverage on these gadget lovers to claim X million people bought its crap and they’ll say they have the best ebook reader, blablabla… In the end everyone will start thinking they are right and they’ll buy their tablet thinking it’s the best experience when it’s not.
  
  PS: I still love macbook pros
- If you want a conventional reading experience, then, of course, the Kindle/Sony wins. Eink alone will guarantee that. But conventional reading is being challenged here and for that reason the iPad will be a major contender in the field. In the long run, the richer reader experience will trumph. In the short run, there is a place for both types of devices.
- A lot of the books I read are design-focused. Color is a must have and is why I held off on buying a device until now.
  
  There is no one, single use case that applies for all people
- Callywag & Rick,
  
  I don’t think you understand the broad consumer audience.
  
  Only a small percent of consumers are as passionate as you are about e-Ink. Most would rather have something they can click a hyperlink on and get a full-color rendered page.
- Kindle is a niched product and not necessarily threatened a multi-purpose device such as the iPad.
- Maybe so if you think of ebooks in the paradigm of printed books.
  
  There is a space for a new style of book that is a whole convergence of different media – to which e-Ink would be unsuited.
- e-Ink. Not so hot for other forms of printed media. Newspapers, Magazines, Comics, and Text Books.
  
  GAME OVER. (Actually maybe i’ll wait until the iPad is actually released)
- I read for hours on the iPhone using the Kindle app and Stanza, and the assertion that doing so on a LED backlit screen “kills your eyes” is completely and totally false.
  
  The idea that the Kindle is more comfortable on the eyes is another common assertion, and in my view it’s also false to fact. I had two Kindles (G1 and G2) and sent both back. You want to really kill your eyes? Try reading the Kindle’s fuzzy low-resolution low-contrast 75% gray text on a 25% gray background.
  
  It was so bad that the only way to make the text legible was to increase the font size… to the point where the iPhone’s screen displayed more words per “page”.
  
  So much for a dedicated reader.
  
  The Kindle might be better if you spend most of your time standing outdoors and reading under the light of the noon sun, but forget reading indoors under anything other than optimum lighting conditions… unless, perhaps, you clip a glaring, silly-looking book light to it.
  
  Then there’s the slow refresh rate, the headache inducing let’s-invert-the-entire-screen page turns, the…
  
  Never mind. The ONLY thing e-ink had going for it was battery life, and today that’s simply not enough. The sooner it’s relegated to the technological scrap heap, the better for us all.
- Thank you for your comment, Michael. It made sense.
  
  I have extreme allergies to dust, etc. I read digital books on my Kindle iPhone app and have waited for a color eBook reader.
  
  I watched videos showcasing the Kindle 1, 2 and DX and was troubled by the method that pages were “turned” and refreshed. I simply didn’t like it. The B&N Nook seemed even worse. So I have held off buying anything.
  
  I like the iPad a lot. I know I will buy one as my official eBook reader as soon as they are released.
- I am thoroughly impressed by Amazon’s PR triumph regarding e-Ink. It is utterly remarkable how there are so many people who genuinely believe e-Ink is better on their eyes than a LED-backed LCD display. This is just utterly false.
  
  When I want to read in bed (while my wife sleeps), I have to clip on one of those little book lights. It’s convenient and practical, but after 30 minutes, my eyes are very tired. The book is unevenly lit, some parts of the page are darker than others, it’s very straining. I usually just put the book down and open a laptop instead. Clear, bright, crisp, evenly lit LCD is infinitely more pleasing on the eyes. I dial down the brightness a bit (my pupils are fully dilated in the dark) and I can read like this for hours.
  
  E-Ink is a masterful marketing gimmick by Amazon and eventually, people will figure this out.
- The only advantage I see of the ipad over the kindle is the color screen. And that gets defeated by its battery life (10 hours is nothing compared to the days or weeks a kindle can go).
  
  When e-ink comes out with its color screens that will fall as well.
  
  The additional functionality is all already covered by my iphone. So price/value wise… iphone (which is also a phone and fulfills a real need) + laptop (which is also a huge productivity tool and fulfills a real need) + kindle (toy to augment the other two) really is a far better value than iphone+laptop+ipad.
  
  the thing that will sell the ipad is the brand which will make it a moderate success. but if you break your ipad, will you replace it? If you break your laptop/iphone you most certainly will. If you break your kindle… you probably will because its far cheaper.
- If Apple supports epub, then there are plenty of sources for ebooks OTHER than the iBookstore, or one could always run the Kindle app, or the B&N app, or the Stanza app, or…
- It’s not a just Large iPod. Can you imagine writing penning notes on an iPod? Nope! But what you can imagine is a developer making a pretty sweet Journal app that will allow us to do just that…
  
  Wake Up people.
  
  Just because you didn’t see a “Mind Blowing” app yesterday doesn’t mean they won’t be created within the next two months.
  
  What we all witnessed yesterday will soon be extended way beyond the cliche techies. It will be in anybody’s hands that doesn’t mind plopping down $500 big ones.
- totally agree. It doesn’t replace anything for me. I have a macbook, iphone and a kindle. all the hubbub about eyestrain – i have significantly less eyestrain on the kindle than I do with an lcd display.
- You are also forgetting the younger generation who are accustomed to reading on backlit screens (smart phones and computers).
- I read entire books on my iPhone. I’ve read entire books on an iPaq, and on a Palm.
  
  The primary reason most people don’t read ebooks on notebooks is that when you’re relaxing or in bed a laptop is heavy and awkward to hold and manipulate.
  
  The backlit screen has little to do with it.
- I can use a kindle outside in full sun.
- Comparing the iPad to the Kindle isn’t like comparing a computer to a typewriter, it’s like comparing a knife to scissors. The knife is obviously better because it can cut so many different things and the scissors are really good at one important task. I predict that scissors will be replaced by knives. They are so much prettier too and come with 60% more hype.
- A digital ink reader under a touch sensitive glass pane with gesture control would be nice though.
The iPad Will Make Apple’s Acquisition Of Quattro Wireless Look Even Smarter

tags: iPad, Ads
- Bigger ads that feel more ‘natural’ than on smaller-size screens, in other words, which undoubtedly means more revenue from in-app display advertising, not to mention an almost certain increase of in-app purchases in most cases.
- During the latest Apple earnings call, the company made it clear that they did not step into the mobile advertising game as an afterthought, and that they want developers to make money off their apps through advertising with a network they own and control, too.
  
  Meaning, Apple will not let Google / AdMob and third-party mobile advertising players run the show. Owning Quattro, Apple has picked up another moneymaker from the App Store goldrush it has itself unleased, and the iPad will only reinforce that situation.
- The same will likely be true on the iPad, but the extra screen real estate gives publishers and ad networks a lot more leverage. And conveniently, Apple is now in a position where it controls both the development environment, the hardware apps run on, the distribution and purchasing platform, as well as a powerful mobile advertising network developers can tap in order to grow their returns on development and marketing investments.
  
  Advertisers spent just $416 million on mobile ads in 2009, compared with $22 billion on Web sites, according to eMarketer, but mobile ad spending is expected to grow to $1.6 billion by 2013. Apple clearly wants a significant piece of that pie, and it already has a lot of what it takes to get just that in place.
Cocoia Blog » iPad UI Roundup

tags: iPad, design
A Kindle World blog: A Million Free Google Books in ePub – for Kindle

tags: kindle, epub, google
- To get a free Google book (most written before 1923 but there are some nice older magazines there as well), go to Google’s book site.
  
  To find a free book (they are all mixed with $$$-books), click on “Full Preview” as those tend to be the free ones. Then do a search for what you want.
  
  At the top right, once you choose a book, you’ll see “Download” which will be a pull-down menu showing a choice of PDF or ePub.
  
  If you have a Kindle DX, you might prefer to just get the PDF. If the words on the PDF are too small though, then get the ePub file. IF you download an ePub file, then:
Google Now Offers Over a Million Free Ebooks in EPUB Format

tags: epub, books
- To download a book, search for a title over at Google Books. Public domain titles will have a download link in the upper right corner. Which brings us to the first major difference between the Kindle and this Google ()-Sony open book strategy: while Amazon only offers 300,000 titles, Google’s million books aren’t, for the most part, the most attractive ones, and Sony’s own ebook library doesn’t offer a choice as good as Amazon – at least when it comes to modern titles.
  
  Sure, if you’re interested in an oldie, such as the Memoirs of Granville Sharp, Google’s library is a good choice, but if you’re looking to buy a digital copy of the latest bestseller, you’re more likely to find it on the Kindle than in Google’s library and Sony’s ebook store combined. You can sometimes buy an ebook online and then transfer it to your Sony ebook reader, but on the Kindle it’s simpler and easier to do.
Savory: Native Kindle epub and PDF Converter – O’Reilly Radar

tags: Kindle, epub, converter
- He is developing Savory, the first native Kindle application. Savory is an open source epub and PDF converter that actually runs natively on the Kindle. While it doesn’t add anything that you couldn’t do from a desktop, it streamlines the process, allowing you copy epubs and PDFs to your Kindle over USB or download them from the web, and immediately read them offline. (O’Reilly provides bookworm, which converts DRM free epubs to HTML and lets you read them through the Kindle’s web browser, as well as DRM-free .mobi formatted versions of much of O’Reilly’s catalog at O’Reilly Ebook Bundles.) Here’s Jesse on why he created Savory:
  
  I’m in love with my Kindle. I’ve been reading ebooks on screens of various sorts for many years, but the Kindle2 is the first device that I actually enjoy reading as much as I enjoy reading paper books. I’ve tried other ebook readers, but for a variety of reasons, they just don’t work for me. My goal is to make it easier for readers to read more free content on the Kindle.
  
  Savory is based on the open source project Calibre — a python application that lets you convert between multiple ebook formats. The implementation is a background daemon that uses inotify to immediately convert the file to the mobi format. To get a performance boost, it uses unladen-swallow — Google’s optimized version of Python. I find it exciting that this paves the way for 3rd party applications on the Kindle.
分析师预计苹果iPad成本：499美元版本成本仅270美元_业界_科技时代_新浪网

tags: iPad
- 　　较之只能通过Wi-Fi上网版本的iPad，具备Wi-Fi和3G上网功能版本的iPad给苹果带来了更高的利润。只能通过Wi-Fi上网、32GB版本iPad售价为599美元，实际造价为316美元，苹果获得了48.1%的利润率；具备Wi-Fi和3G上网功能、32GB版本iPad售价为729美元，实际造价为332美元，苹果获得了55.1%的利润率。根据马绍尔的估算，这是苹果从iPad获得的最高利润率。
  
  　　如果只能通过Wi-Fi上网版本的iPad销量超过具备Wi-Fi和3G上网功能版本的iPad，那么苹果从iPad系列产品中获得的总体利润率大概为50%。马绍尔在研究报告中表示，iPad是苹果的又一个吸金产品，他将iPad今年的销量预期从220万部上调至700万部。
乔布斯放言出版商不满亚马逊 iPad挑战Kindle_业界_科技时代_新浪网

tags: iPad, Kindle
- 　分析师们预计，iPad发售第一年销量将达到400万-1000万部。恩德勒预计为400万-600万部，具体数据主要取决于市场竞争反应。不过，亚马逊不会坐以待毙，任由苹果重演在数字音乐领域的成功，争夺电子书出版领域的主导地位。亚马逊可能必须作出调整，从而与iPad以及竞争对手的第三代电子书阅读器产品展开更为激烈的较量。
苹果iPad推出疑问缠身_业界_科技时代_新浪网

tags: iPad, Kindle
- 　　此外，电子书籍的价格也值得注意。当初推出iTunes音乐店面的时候，苹果方面对于每首歌曲99美分的售价是着实大力宣传了一番的，但是在 iBookstore身上，他们的调门显然就低了许多。乔布斯的演示版已经购买了肯尼迪参议员(Edward Kennedy)的回忆录《真正的指南针》，而其售价是14.99美元。亚马逊则不同，他们在出版商方面所进行的努力确保了每本书的价格最高不过9.99 美元。

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My daily readings 01/30/2010

January 30, 2010

Developers, not Apple, will make or break the iPad

tags: ipad
- Just a few key video streaming apps might push some potential buyers over the edge: Hulu, Netflix, Comcast’s Xfinity. Combine those with the 3G connection, and the iPad finally has a good reason to exist. Then there is the education angle with Wikipedia (it’d make a nice app), classroom screen sharing, and e-textbooks among other things.
Amazon Fourth Quarter Sales Up 42 Percent, Bezos Says “Millions Of People Own Kindles”

tags: kindle
- Beyond being vague about how many “millions” of people own a Kindle (is it two million or 20 million?), Amazon also mentions that there are now 410,000 books available on the Kindle. The depth and breadth of that catalog is the Kindle’s greatest strength. Amazon also emphasized that its digital books can by synched between its own family of Kindles as well as PCs, “iPhone, iPod touch and soon, Blackberry, Mac and iPad.”
- I don’t even have a Kindle but have been buying Kindle books because of the awesome app for iPhone. Jeff Bezos is money
- Apple has one market right for reading books: those customers who buy 1-3 books a year (folks who buy the latest Dan Brown or JK Rowling). People who read a lot will probably be disappointed in the initial (at least) selection available in iBooks (according to reports, of course…no one outside Apple knows what it will be like when iPad actually ships).
  
  Like all unabashed Apple fanboys, I will have an iPad as soon as it’s available, and I hope Amazon ships the Kindle for iPad App simultaneously. I love the Amazon.com shopping experience, I love reading, I love WhisperSync, and I love reading in bed with my Kindle 2, reading casually on subways, in bars, and while waiting on line in random places with the Kindle for iPhone App. I’m sure I’m going to love reading in the same manner on my iPad. With WhisperSync, it doesn’t matter which device I’m using at any given moment…I always pick up where I left off on whichever device I last used.
  
  It’s the Kindle service that’s the magic here, not the device (which, admittedly, looks like it was designed by a blind COBOL programmer).
3 Million Amazon Kindles Sold, Apparently

tags: kindle
- We’ve checked with our sources, who have been amazingly accurate on the number of Kindle’s sold over the last couple of years. The total number of all types of Kindles out there in users hands hit 3 million sometime in December, says a source close to Amazon. And that was before the new model with worldwide data hit. And before Amazon started offering free Kindles to select long-time customers.
Dan Pink on the surprising science of motivation | Video on TED.com

tags: motivation, psychology, management
The iPad And Chrome OS Netbooks Are On A Collision Course

tags: ipad, Chrome
- Now, it remains to be seen if people who buy an iPad will do so instead of buying a netbook. At first, I’m not so sure that will be the case. But it stands to reason that eventually, this will happen. And as Jobs’ comments on stage on Wednesday made abundantly clear, that’s Apple’s idea too. In their eyes, you shouldn’t buy a cheap, underpowered PC, you should buy an iPad, their anti-netbook.
- And what’s interesting is that for either of the two to be massive hits, they both will need consumers to continue to feel comfortable moving away from traditional software applications such as Microsoft Office. But their plans to get consumers to do that are very different. Google wants everyone to move towards doing everything on their apps in the cloud. Apple, as they made clear with their overly-long iWork for iPad demo on Wednesday, wants everyone to move towards using iPhone OS-based apps.
- If this market between laptops and smartphones proves big enough, perhaps the two frenemies can once again find a common ground and band together to defeat their common enemy: Microsoft. But the obvious strategy for this used to be that Google would attack Microsoft from the bottom with its Chrome OS netbooks, while Apple attacked from the top with their premium computers, leaving Microsoft squeezed in the middle. With the iPad now clearly aimed at netbooks thanks to its pricing and Apple’s positioning, everything is different.
- Really, Mr. MG? You think iPhone OS based iWork apps beat Google’s cloud based competition? May be for minority, or for people who needs to maintain grocery lists. But not for majority of people.
  I didn’t even open iWork apps since I installed Snow Leopard few months ago. I either used (Open)Office suit of apps where serious work is needed, or used Google apps where cloud based access is needed. Simply iWork is either not powerful enough for serious work, or not economical enough for cloud based access.
  I might still buy an iPad, but not for the reasons you mentioned here.
- Think about it from a developer’s standpoint. With Apple, you could develop something on the iPhone or iPad first, and then tweak it a little bit to work on the other device. You only have to think about a max of two platforms, both with a huge base of users who have demonstrated that they are will to pay good money for quality apps.
  
  Then look at Google. You could develop something for Android, and there’s no guarantee that it will even work on all android phones. Plus, they have not done a good job training their users to pay for apps, so you’ll hardly make any money even if it’s one of the best apps on the platform. And then you can’t leverage any of your android hard work on Chrome OS because the two have even less in common.
  
  If developers are the difference between success and failure (as a different TC post has said today) then Apple has already won. It’s the ecosystem.
- …I’m not so sure about that (the money side of things). Watch this video from Dan Pink: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_pink_on_motivation.html and you’ll see money is not a great motivator for creative work.
  
  Sure, plenty of people will continue to develop for the iPhone & iPad to support themselves, but you only have to look as far as Firefox or WordPress to see that tens of thousands of developers will gladly work for free.
How will the iPad change education? « PBS TeacherLine Blog

tags: ipad, education
What the iPad Means for Textbooks, Maybe | BU Today

tags: ipad, education
- What does that mean for textbooks? Plenty, some observers say, but no one knows when. CourseSmart, a publisher of more than 8,800 e-textbooks, already makes an application for the
  iPhone and iPod Touch and is reportedly working on software for the iPad. And one option that is already available is iBooks, an application from
  Apple that allows users to download e-books straight to their device.
  HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster, both publishers of trade books,
  are already signed on. Some technology Web sites have reported that a
  partnership with textbook publisher McGraw-Hill was supposed to
  have been included in the presentation, but Apple’s Steve Jobs banned any mention of them after
  a McGraw-Hill executive leaked word of the deal on Tuesday
  night. Jobs, for his part, mentioned that his company was “very excited” about textbooks, then moved on.
- Samantha Dubois (COM’12) agrees. “I guess if I already owned it I would maybe use it for textbooks, but it doesn’t seem to do much that my laptop doesn’t already do,” she says. “I’d rather have the physical book in front of me, because it would be easier to annotate and highlight.”
PaperBus / The Free Proxy Service!

tags: proxy
Papers : mekentosj.com : Software for Research

tags: research, mac, papers, pdf, science
Is gaming the Apple iPad’s ‘killer app’? – Telegraph

tags: iPad, Games
- “The games you can play on these devices are unlike any other, because of the
  accelerometer and the touch-screen display,” says Greg Joswiak, a senior
  executive at Apple.
  
  “It goes way beyond what you can do on a device like [the Nintendo DS], which
  is old-school gaming. Devices like the iPod touch are redefining the future
  of gaming. We have more games than the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP combined,
  and then some.”
  
  The price of the games is also key: the low cost of digital delivery and
  comparitively low development costs meant dozens of top notch games from the
  likes of Electronic Arts could be downloaded from the App Store for less
  than a fiver — a revelation for gamers used to spending £40 on a video game
  in the shops.
  
  “That changes the economics, it changes the entire business,” says Joswiak.
  “The prices of our games are so much lower [than Nintendo or Sony]. When
  you’re getting games for just a few pounds, people tend to experiment more,
  because it’s not such a major investment.”
What’s the Apple iPad’s Killer App? – Reviews by PC Magazine

tags: iPad
- I think Apple getting into the ebook business is hugely disruptive, but I will address that in another column. Instead, I would say that the iPad is going to be used as a flexible, interactive window on our digital lives. In case you don’t know, your “digital life” includes what you read, what you watch, what you write, what you share, who you know, where you have been, and where you are going. Remember, everything that runs on the iPhone will run on the iPad. That means every recipe finder, work-out tracker, social media updater, language translator, photo viewer, guitar-chord tuner, and finger painting app available in the App Store will work on the iPad.

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My daily readings 01/29/2010

January 29, 2010

What the iPad Means to Developers [News, iPhone] | CreativeApplications.Net

tags: iPad
- But, while some people may be disappointed that it’s ‘basically a big iPhone’, I don’t think they realize the potential for a whole new breed of multitouch applications, and a slew of new usage scenarios. The simple addition of a larger screen (and a faster processor) allows for much deeper applications that just weren’t possible on the iPhone.
- I believe that the biggest app areas for the iPad will be news reading and games (two areas already huge on the iPhone). Creative applications also stand to gain a great deal on the iPad. The launch presentation featured the Brushes app – Apple chose this app out of hundreds of thousands of apps because it’s easy to see how much better it is with a larger screen. There’s less need to zoom in / out and you can work on a larger canvas. Hopefully with a few additional brushes this app could be a very serious tool for artists. Having direct hands on contact with the screen makes digital painting so much more attractive than trying to paint with a mouse, or even a stylus.
- Location-based services will be pretty useless since I doubt most people will go for the 3G option. There’s no camera either, so photo taking, video conferencing and augumented reality are out.
- In terms of new features offered by the SDK, I can’t really go into detail since it’s covered by a NDA. However, I will say that Apple has addressed one major gripe of creative app developers, which is that there is no built in way to exchange files with your desktop computer. This shortcoming should now be solved (and it’s used by Apple’s own iWorks apps). The rest of the new additions mostly focus on new GUI elements which take advantage of the extra screen space.
Hacker News | Joe Hewitt on the iPad

tags: iPad
- If we leave aside the downsides, we are left with two major things here:
  - Simplified computer that the majority can handle fully on their own without someone’s help. They can choose what apps they want, get rid of ones they don’t want, etc. It does take the stress & overhead away from installing stuff on your machine. That means people will install stuff.
  
  - Assumed location awareness, connectivity, camera (eventually), mic, headphones, accelerometer, ambient light sensor along with the UI is a genuinely new paradigm
  
  Those two things together have the potential to be a very big deal.
- I commented on a previous post that I wouldn’t read another iPad article, because all the ones I had read were tripe that bludgeoned the device for ideological reasons, or praised it because it’s shiny.
  However, I respect Joe Hewitt’s iPhone work and other writings, so I checked out his article, and I finally got some real insight. This is certainly the best iPad article I’ve read so far. The idea that we need to re-imagine all of our current software with the capabilities of a large, responsive touchscreen is a good take on the release.
  
  The only thing that worries me is the risk… what’s the chance people don’t buy these things? Apple has had a flop or two in its past, and even though I develop iPhone apps, I’m a bit leery of developing iPad apps.
- I can’t claim to be an Android expert but coding Java in Eclipse is a big pain in the butt. Some people love Eclipse. I am not one of those people.
  With respect to iPhone/iPad development, Cocoa is the most beautiful and consistent framework I have worked with. It’s the best implementation of MVC I’ve worked with. Objective-C is a little crufty but message passing languages are so much more elegant than method calling languages like C++/C#/Java.
  
  With respect to Android based tablets, Google has done a huge disservice and fragmented the market by pushing Chrome OS for tablets.
Joe Hewitt on iPad

I a software engineer from Santa Cruz, CA. Some of my work includes Facebook for iPhone, Firebug, iUI, and early Firefox.

tags: iPad
- Most of the iPad reactions I’ve read have been negative, but I have been completely satisfied with what Apple announced. iPad is exactly the product I’ve been wishing for ever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints.
- I spent a year and a half attempting to reduce a massive, complex social networking website into a handheld, touch-screen form factor. My goal was initially just to make a mobile companion for the facebook.com mothership, but once I got comfortable with the platform I became convinced it was possible to create a version of Facebook that was actually better than the website! Of all the platforms I’ve developed on in my career, from the desktop to the web, iPhone OS gave me the greatest sense of empowerment, and had the highest ceiling for raising the art of UI design. Except there was one thing keeping me from reaching that ceiling: the screen was too small.
- Beyond just Facebook, most of the apps I used most on my iPhone also suffered from these limitations, like Google Reader, Instapaper, and all image, video, and text editing tools. The bottom line is, many apps which were cute toys on iPhone can become full-featured power tools on the iPad, making you forget about their desktop/laptop predecessors. We just have to invent them.
- iPad is an incredible opportunity for developers to re-imagine every single category of desktop and web software there is. Seriously, if you’re a developer and you’re not thinking about how your app could work better on the iPad and its descendants, you deserve to get left behind.
- Given my concerns about the way Apple runs the App Store, you might expect me to jump on the bandwagon screaming about how Apple is evil and iPad is the death of open computing. Nonsense. My only problem with Apple is the fact that they insist on pre-approving every app on the App Store. The store may not be open, but the iPhone/iPad platform itself could hardly be more open to tinkerers of all ages.
- It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.
- So, in the end, what it comes down to is that iPad offers new metaphors that will let users engage with their computers with dramatically less friction. That gives me, as a developer, a sense of power and potency and creativity like no other. It makes the software market feel wide open again, like no one’s hegemony is safe. How anyone can feel underwhelmed by that is beyond me.
Alex Payne — On the iPad

tags: iPad
Hacker News | IPad: an Apple for Mom – The uncomputer for the people

tags: iPad, product, strategy
- In the MMO genre, this divide is called “themepark vs sandbox”. A game like World of Warcraft is a themepark – you’re given a lot of direction in terms of where you’re supposed to go and what you’re supposed to do. EVE Online is a sandbox – you do whatever you want and you get fewer roadsigns that say “go this way” or “beating this means you win”.
  Current computers are sandboxes – you can do with them whatever you want, run arbitrary code, create your own workflow, and operate without rules. The iPad is a themepark – it has specific programs that do specific things, and then it’s got little roped off paths between them. For many users (the proverbial Mom), a well-developed theme park is more attractive, because all they really wanted to do anyhow is ride the roller-coaster or the Ferris wheel. People like the average Hacker News reader (or even the average reddit or digg reader) can’t stand the roped off paths, but for Mom, those laid out sidewalks are a relief.
danieltenner.com — iPad: an Apple for Mom

tags: iPad
- In today’s (western) world, not having any computer at home makes life difficult. My mom needs some way to check airline ticket prices, to find out the weather, to go on Facebook, to buy movie tickets, to check her email, to call me on Skype, and a thousand other little uses that aren’t very taxing or challenging for either her or whatever device she’s using.
  
  She doesn’t really need a computer in the same sense that I do, though. As a programmer, I need a machine that is powerful, that I can mess with under the hood, that I can do everything with. My mom needs a reasonably priced machine that Simply Works and does all those simple things that she wants to do when she’s at home.
- Apple has grandiosely claimed that the iPad is creating an entirely new product category, and I think they’re right.
- A better comparison is with the Nintendo Wii. While Sony and Microsoft competed in the cut-throat market of consoles for gamers, the Wii also created a new product category: consoles for everyone else. It worked pretty well for them – it turns out that there’s a lot more non-gamers than gamers, and making a device that appeals to 95% of the population sells better than making one that appeals to only 5%.
  
  And that’s exactly what Apple is doing: making a slick “uncomputer” that’s tailored to those people who don’t actually need a computer. Many gamers ended up buying Wiis too, and I’m sure many geeks will buy iPads, but the real money-maker will be those who don’t even have a Mac, and probably won’t ever have one because it’s too expensive and they don’t need it.
- The only question, in my my mind, is, what will these people do when their cheap old Dell finally clonks out? Right now, to use an iPad and iPhone effectively, it seems you still need some kind of base station. So when the old Dell gives up the ghost, will people buy another one? Pony up for an expensive Mac? Or simply decide that the iPad is good enough and they don’t want another laptop?
Stanford Releases New iPhone App Development Course | Open Culture

tags: iphone, stanford, course
- This week, Stanford has started rolling out a new App Development course (get it in video on iTunes), one adapted to the new iPhone operating system that Apple released last summer. Two lectures have been released so far. More will get rolled out on a weekly basis. Please note, these courses also appear in our collection of Computer Science Courses, a subset of our larger collection of Free Courses from leading universities.
What’s Missing from the Apple iPad?

tags: ipad
- Another carryover from the iPhone ecosystem — and not a favorable one, in my humble opinion — is the requirement of syncing your iPad with another computer as the primary content management system for the device. Assuming it works the same way as your iPod or iPhone do now, you’ll only be able to associate your iPad with a single other device — and that’s a dealbreaker for a growing number of households that have media strewn across several computers, hard drives, network attached storage units, and beyond.
  
  You’ll be downloading content from the web and through the iTunes content store directly from the device, of course, but what about that set of files just brought home from work, or that collection of videos I want to dredge out from an old backup drive. In order to get them over to the iPad I’d have to first dump them into iTunes, then perform a sync operation — instead of being able to simply drag and drop them over Wi-Fi or simply hook them in via USB Mass Storage (a great standard that’s been around forever!). There are third-party iPhone apps that allow file transfer via Wi-Fi, but how many steps are we needlessly adding to a process that was uncomplicated by USB Mass Storage years ago?

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My daily readings 01/28/2010

January 28, 2010

This is why it’s worth learning about advertising, by Rory Marinich

tags: Ads, marketing
- Our most advanced technology in a magical and revolutionary device at an unbelievable price.
- Geeks are getting pissed off because this isn’t a real computer/doesn’t run OS X/doesn’t have XYZ/is a glorified iPod touch. This is because geeks know nothing about advertising, which is another way of saying they don’t know how people work
- And guys, they have a point. This thing could save the publishing industry and the newspaper/magazine industry. It could revolutionize the digital fine arts. It does essentially everything that can possibly fit on a screen that size, almost unconsciously. It is so magic that it does things you’d never imagine wanting something to do. (There’s a hands-on video of a guy handing the iPad to his friend, and by the time the friend’s picked up the other end the screen’s flipped over and reoriented itself for him.)
- Verizon launched a Droid ad two months ago that essentially let the world know how doomed they were. The ad showed a bunch of “iDon’t”s. iDon’t have 5 megapixels. iDon’t have multitasking. Item after item of flaws in the iPhone that this new technology could solve.
  
  Apple, meanwhile, showed a phone that could speak foreign languages at you, identify birdcalls in the wilderness, guide you through cities. They weren’t selling technical features. They were selling you magic. Real magic. The kind of magic where, thanks to world-class designers and programmers and marketers, it actually comes true.
- Other companies are selling computers. Apple’s selling magic. Which one would you rather have?
Hacker News | How A Great Product Can Be Bad News: Apple, iPad, and the Closed Mac

tags: no_tag
- This post adequately sums up my concerns.
  Here we have a device that doesn’t support USB thumbdrives, doesn’t support dropbox (at least system-wide, I assume the dropbox iphone app would work), is unable to run ruby or any of my other dev scripts/tools, cannot install firefox or firefox plugins, etc.
  
  I do not want to see computing head this direction.
- My dad, mom, grandma, and grandpa can watch videos, look at photos of their kids/grandkids, send e-mails to their relatives oversees, and read their favorite books on it, all without the need for a “computer-savvy guy” who has to teach them how it works, and fix it when it’s broken. In other words, it’s a logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution. I understand you need to run your Ruby scripts, but this product was designed for the 99% of the people in this country instead. You’re not the target audience.
- This is about far more than running your own Ruby scripts. It’s about the fact that true innovation cannot exist in such an environment. And the problem is, you will not see what you’re missing; people won’t bother developing new technologies that have no platform they can legally run on.
  
  Would the Web exist if Microsoft had been able to ban Netscape from running on Windows? What new, groundbreaking technologies are we missing out on because it’s not worth the time and effort to create something new if the platform vendor can simply forbid you from publishing it?
- The App store and the iPhone have fostered a colossal amount of innovation, and made a lot of normal non-techy people very, very happy. And a bunch of techies too.
- >it being about my Mum being able to use it without having to phone me saying that it’s all gone wrong again
  You’re confusing correlation with causation. The fact that your Mum has been unable to use devices in the past is not _caused_ by the devices being open platforms. Lots of people can’t even operate a dvd player and they are certainly locked down devices. Being easy to operate and being locked down are mutually exclusive.
- The logical conclusion of the personal computer revolution is the person doesn’t control their device?! That’s not revolutionary; that’s a return to the bad old days…
- Yes, because most people don’t want a device. They want to be able to watch videos, read books and listen to music. The enabling device is incidental.
- The iPad is a living room computer, a couch computer, a coffee-table computer. It won’t live on a desk, it will live in the places in a house that people live in. The goal is not to replace desktop computers, but to supplement them.
- I heartily disagree. There’s a big difference, huge difference between “can barely” and “does it really fucking well”. The iPad shoots for the latter (we’ll see if it hits), the netbook’s mere existence is predicated on the former.
  
  If your definition of “can do the same” means “someone willing to bang their head hard enough and willing to live with a substandard user experience can do it”, sure. But IMHO we need to strive for a higher standard than that.
  
  After the iPod, the Mac, and the iPhone, I don’t think geeks still get why Apple is successful: they build devices that normal people actually want. I think there is some collective head-in-the-sand in the geek community because what people apparently want is not at all like what geeks want. The average user doesn’t want freedom, doesn’t want an open kernel, doesn’t give a shit about standards, they want to have a slick, usable, and intuitive user experience, and so far netbooks are failing hard at it.
  
  The average user doesn’t want the ability to hunt down zip files on obscure websites, downloading the file, and being able to run whatever app is inside. They like having a central place where all apps in the universe reside. This may or may not be good for the industry as a whole, but it is what our users desire.
  
  IMHO the constant spec-based wankery is why nobody has yet caught up with Apple. I’m seeing a lot of internet chatter about how netbooks do more (does more, poorly), how the cost is too high, how the CPU is too slow, blah blah blah, but conveniently ignores what is IMHO the one defining reason Apple has succeeded in the last decade: user interface.
  
  “My Android phone isn’t locked down!” <– Your Android phone also crashes all the time, emits strange cryptic messages that only developers understand (“a process has been forced to exit”?)
- I wonder, how many people were sad when gearbox in their car went from stick to auto, when choke control disappeared, when you could no longer tinker with carburetor, because it was gone.
  There will always be two groups of people, one group of those wanting to hack things, and another, much much larger group of those who want just use them. For every one John who wants to chip his car engine there will be five millions Joes who just want to get from the point A to the point B with the least hassle possible. As it happens Apples iProducts are aimed at the second group—deal with it. Just like ITMS and App Store may be the fastest and most hassle-free way to get what you want on your device.
  
  I’ve spent some time thinking, do I want iPad. The answer is: I do. I like to read when in bed, iPad is perfect for this. I cannot take my iMac to bed, and reading with notebook is not as convenient as it can be with iPad: that damn keyboard gets in a way, event when I barely use it.
  
  iPad is very well suited for what it is intended for: surfing the web, reading the books, some email. Let’s not forget it has UI specifically tailored for the device and multitouch use. It should be great for tasks it was meant to do, and not so great for all others.
  
  It is time to stop thinking about anything with CPU inside as the computer.
- Wrong analogy, I think. There is an important difference between desire to tinker and desire to control. I don’t tinker with my car, but I’m not going to allow the manufacturer to dictate who must repair it, where I must buy gas, which roads I can use…
  Apple reminds me of homeland security, but prettier!
- I’m not sure you’ve killed the metaphor yet.
  Because, in fact, the sale of gas is subject to a great deal of regulation. That’s to prevent someone from selling you adulterated gas that destroys your car’s emission system. Or from selling you leaded gas that pollutes the air that our kids have to breathe.
  
  And the reason the manufacturer doesn’t need to enforce your use of the roads is that it’s already being enforced by a higher authority. We have cops for that. And they very much do dictate that you keep your car on public roads, and not go driving off across someone else’s lawn, or the National Mall.
  
  If you think these extensions to the metaphor make no sense, you’re missing the elephant in the room: Personal computers are insecure, and the average web surfer is more likely (probably, alas, by an order of magnitude) to have their computer steal their credit card numbers or grind to a halt under a flood of malware than they are to crack open the box or write a single line of code. An enormous number of people don’t want the freedom I want, any more than they want to own an acetylene torch.
- It’s a bit like cars.
  Cars used to be ‘user servicable’, you could take them apart and put them back together again, or repair them with simple tools.
  
  The further you integrate something the further away you get from ‘user servicable’.
  
  Due to emissions controls cars were equipped with injection systems and motor management, and then car manufacturers discovered ‘lock-in’, how to make money on obfuscation in stead of openness.
  
  Computing is doing the exact same thing.
  
  Gone are the simple serial and parallel interfaces, and in their place you get undocumented docking connectors and other ‘magic’.
  
  The only thing that keeps things open to some extent is the fact that the internet arrived just in time to save us from complete lock in hell. The protocols are standardized enough to let devices talk to each other.
  
  So that’s where you’re going to find your new ‘openness’, at the protocol level.
  
  Serverside it will take a long time to go ‘closed’, but on the client side I would expect to see more and more devices that are closed as much as possible.
  
  Gaming hardware has already gone that way, mobile phones started out closed (‘to protect the networks’, as if client side security would be good enough for a carrier).
  
  It’s not a good development, but it will happen.
  
  Tech savvy people can only push back by releasing their own open devices, the open source variety of hardware.
- That Apple is creating a closed system is of little surprise. Steve Jobs is all about control. It works in the short term, but I believe it will bite them in the ass over the long-term.
  Making use of a closed-system and trying to be the best in a category assumes that you have access to the most brilliant minds in that field, and the most brilliant marketing campaign. What makes Apple great? Well, they can control every aspect of their production because they own all their own tools and can keep out the crap. Also, they have slick industrial design. For now they also have some of the most brilliant minds in the industry, but not all of them. This is why they will never achieve world domination with their products. I suppose I could make use of their own advertising to make an example : “I’m a mac, I’m a PC”. You are either an apple person or you’re not. Their closed-system allows little flexibility. They would be doomed to what they used to be were it not for them opening their file formats to standards.
  
  Why is this not the best approach? Because of human innovation. People hate being held down, forced into one category, etc. This is what apple is doing, but because their products are so innovative, consumers will go for it.
  
  Google is much smarter; they know what to hold onto and what to open up for the masses. Even though they employ many geniuses, they are always on the search for new innovative ideas. That’s why they purchase so many startups, or so I’ve been told.
  
  That’s why I believe in a race between Google and Apple, Apple WILL lose eventually.
  
  Closed-systems should actually drive innovation because they must be circumvented. That’s why Apple products are cracked all the time. So I guess the challenge then is, that if you aren’t happy with Apple, build a better product and market it as well as they do. All things being equal, the open-system product will win every time. You can’t employ all of the brightest people yourself, all of the time. I think Apple will learn this in due time, and then things will change.
  
  A sidenote is that a large part of Apple’s appeal is simplicity because of their closed-system. If anyone could create an opem-system as turnkey as theirs, they’d come ahead by far. I think one of the closest systems to being fully open and turnkey I’ve seen so far is Facebook Connect, but I’m starting to become too long-winded, so I’ll leave it at that.
- “It works in the short term, but I believe it will bite them in the ass over the long-term.”
  I disagree. Both Apple and Nintendo have shown proof that their closed ‘circle of one’ system works. Yes both of them have had a lot of big missed opportunities in the past because of this, but what matters more for these companies is profitability and not marketshare. Both Apple’s and Nintendo’s closed systems have led to large margins, and a healthy supply of cash flow and reserves.
  
  Yes it doesn’t really fully cater to us, but we’re not their main market.
- If apple think their iPhone success shows that people like closed systems, they are kidding themselves. Phones have never really been open (thanks to the carriers), so the iPhone was actually one of the more open phones out there. But once they start competing with actual computers, it is going to be very different.
- For us as hackers, computer use is more like politics. We want the openness to do what we want, to dig around, to break things and fix them again, to change things. For most people, however, computer use is more like a meal. Give them some great toys to play with and they won’t mind the limitations at all.
- This is explicitly about locking developers down, and not allowing them to do things that Apple does not approve of. Want to write a competing web browser? Sorry, you can’t. Want to write an awesome JIT that optimizes itself for their shiny new chip? No can do.
- Unfortunately, this is what people like my mom and my sister want: something dead simple and easy to use like iPhone.
  Both OSX and Windows still give them a lot of trouble.
  
  It’s hard to pair both freedom and flexibility with ease of use and simplicity.
- I know of no other company that can charge $100 for 16GB of flash memory. Differentiating on real features like 3G is good and expected. Differentiating on commodity hardware like memory is unfair.
  With the ubiquity of SD and micro SD and need for more and more storage due to the explosion of digital media, they don’t even provide a port. Obviously, they don’t provide a port because it would destroy their product line. When you have the cheapest digital electronics providing these ports and high-end hardware like the iPod/Phone/Pad not providing it, that says a lot. It says “we don’t care about anything except our product the money in your wallet.”
  
  It’s ironic that MS gets so much flack from developers in the OSS purist and Apple fanbois camps about their closed products. They’ve always been the most open from the hardware perspective and they’ve always been great to developers. Apple is just the opposite.
  
  If we care about an open future in computing, we need to think clearly about which platforms to develop for.
- Apple is no longer called Apple Computers because they will not sell computers anymore. They will sell closed devices with a closed software ecosystem. They will also sell the best devices money can buy.
Hacker News | The iPad Big Picture

tags: no_tag
- What nobody talks about is the impact iPad could have on the data-entry / industrial market. I’m pretty certain that I’ll be buying a bunch of the 16GB $499 iPads for my job (pharma manufacturing). Make a simple web-app for collecting data and the iPad replaces paper easier than any other 4x more expensive tablet. No need to setup or install software or custom apps: Safari + default onscreen keyboard works just fine.
- The message the desktop Linux community is refusing to learn from. At least half your points are fairly directly based on the state of Linux at the moment (e.g. Safari, ease of setup) and the other half linked to the state of the ecosystem surrounding Linux which pushes for cheaper and hackier solutions (wifi drivers, perception of coolness, implementation of software and hardware quality).
- I am a big fan of apple product and I don’t wanna be rude to the author, mostly because I don’t know much about him. But this post reminds me of a typical obnoxious apple fanboy.
  “Its not only good, it awesome, super, duper good.”
  
  Lets not get carried away now. We know almost nothing about the processor. We don’t know how it will compare against a similar range intel processor. We don’t know how much the ipad OS (which obviously isn’t _exactly_ the same as iphone OS) was optimized for this processor.
  
  Most importantly we can only speculate about apple’s _real_ reason for going into chip making business, it might not be because they have a better product – but in the long run it might be cheaper for them to make their own.
- Gruber, the author is the alpha dog of mac fanboys.
  He sets the tone for the rest of the tribe. He is very good in what he does.
  
  What you see may be the remnants of the reality distortion field he was exposed to today
- I think the iPad will be successful but it will have more of an iPod success curve versus an iPhone out-of-the-gate smash hit curve. I believe there are some pieces that aren’t in place yet. I think eventually, to hit the magic price point, Apple needs to find a way to subsidize the iPad without a cellular carrier. I suspect that will be in the form of an iTunes subscription program. Shave $100 off the cost to build it and subsidize it by $200 via an $8/month charge built into the subscription program. All you can eat books, movies, music and TV. $199 out the door. That’s the point where everyone will want an iPad the same way the iPhone became hugely successful at the same price point. $499 is a very reasonable starting point for now. I think they’ll easily sell 3-5 million of them this year. The last thought I have is that Apple’s hype machine probably got a little ahead of themselves here. CNN had the iPad release as their Breaking News story for a couple hours today. That’s probably a sign that your hype factor was impossibly high. That puts you firmly into backlash territory. I would expect to see another round of features/enhancements/deals shortly before it’s release — probably in conjunction with iPhone OS 4.
Daring Fireball: The iPad Big Picture

tags: no_tag
- Lastly, there’s the fact that the iPad is using a new CPU designed and made by Apple itself: the Apple A4. This is a huge deal. I got about 20 blessed minutes of time using the iPad demo units Apple had at the event today, and if I had to sum up the device with one word, that word would be “fast”.
- But: everyone I spoke to in the press room was raving first and foremost about the speed. None of us could shut up about it. It feels impossibly fast. (And our next thought: What happens if Apple has figured out a way to make a CPU like A4 that fits in an iPhone? If they pull that off for this year’s new iPhone, look out.)
  
  Apple doesn’t talk much about the technical details of the iPhone. They never talk about CPU speed or the name of the chip being used. They don’t tell you how much RAM is in there. Part of their vision for moving computers from technical culture to popular culture is about getting away from defining these things by their technical specs. So the prominent talk about A4 is telling. This is something they want us to notice.
- We believe in the simple, not the complex. We believe that we need to own and control the primary technologies behind the products we make, and participate only in markets where we can make a significant contribution.”
- They’re Microsoft and Intel rolled into one when it comes to mobile computing. In the pre-taped video Apple showed, Bob Mansfield said of the iPad, “No one else could do it.” Only Apple.
Inkling

tags: learning, network
The iPad Vs. The Kindle: How Should Amazon Respond?

tags: iPad, Kindle
- If I were running the Kindle I would answer this question today: “Are we innovating the publishing or the entertainment industry?” Is the Kindle just for my reading entertainment or is it for watching, listening, gaming, browsing, sharing photos, and communicating with friends & family too? Ultimately the answer is shaped by consumer preference, competitors and time measured in years.
  
  As a product guy this is a really intriguing question to try to unravel—which path should Amazon choose? Over time this is what may push the Kindle into being more than just a reader
- Today, Kindle enjoys a price advantage over the iPad. It is nearly half the price, starting at $260 versus $500 for the iPad, although the cheapest Kindle DX with an equivalent 9.7 inch screen is $489. That is pretty close already. What happens when the price of iPad-like devices trend down to a point of consumer indifference?
- Pad Product Strategy
  
  Offer a relatively inexpensive multimedia consumption device + Reinvent reading experience via interactive elements within the ebooks = Charge for brokering reading material (iBooks) = Own publishers as part of a 5-yr growth plan, similarly to music studios but with a HUGE profit twist: embed interactive ads in the ebooks (u cannot do that with songs) and make the money tenfold by brokering the ads yourself (recent acquisitions).
  
  It is clear to me that Apple wants to promote “ebook consumption”. All other features are on the side, kind of side competitive advantages to give iTab an edge over generic ereaders.
  
  No Camera
  1. No interest in “making videos (Apple does not make money of amateur videos – Google does).
  2. No interest in augmented reality. Too early for that, unproven business models, iPad too big to take pictures with, etc.
  3. Camera would add to the cost
  4. Risk of cannibalizing macbook sales by adding HW features
  = Leave the camera out for now, focus on “reading material”, see how the market reacts and adjust accordingly (next gen will probably include one)
  
  No Flash
  Apple promotes its own app store + developers. Lock Adobe outside the room, let them spend more money to open the door. When they eventually get in the room, they will see the crowd and be forced out goodbye Adobe and nice to meeting you! Stay isolated in the “static” web. The mobile space is ours!
  
  Memory
  Enough for average readers. Heavy user? Pay more, start storing online (related apple-owned app coming soon, i would certainly believe)
  
  Accessories
  Offer some (keyboard, case, blahblah) to lock third parties out. Let Bose produce the speakers
  
  Price
  Great. Match the most useless competitor, crash them to the ground, forever. How did they dare launch tablets knowing we are coming?
  
  To me, all the pieces were there. It always takes someone with charisma and talent to put them together. Apple has both. But it also has a couple of problems: Google + Google.
- I’m both an Amazon and Apple fanboy; having a Macbook Pro, iPhone 3GS and a Kindle 2. To be honest, I can’t see myself getting an iPad based off of the eBook reading functionality (or for any reason really – just not something I need).
  
  For textbooks and reference guides I think the iPad will definitely be the better choice because the larger color display and overall speed is a huge advantage, but I’ve sat back with my Kindle and read hundreds of pages in a single sitting and thousands of pages over the period of a few days. And at no point through that time did I feel like I was reading off an electronic device – it felt completely natural, just like the E-Ink technology is marketed. I very much doubt the iPad could handle that.
  
  For the average person I’d still say the iPad is the more attractive (especially since there’s that statistic that the average person reads like 1 book after college or something) but for the Kindle’s target audience – people who read a lot of books – I doubt there’ll be much competition when the numbers are crunched.
- Exactly. The Kindle is an amazing reading device. It doesn’t feel electronic. The screen and the battery life are amazing.
  
  Sure maybe you could read books on the iPad, but to buy an iPad to read books would be absolutely stupid. This isn’t going to make a dent in Kindle, as much as Apple fanbois say otherwise.
- Kindle needs to embrace the iPad.
  Focus on the Kindle iPhone app and add functionality so it can compete with iBooks.
  
  I think when people compare the iPad to the Kindle they forget (or just haven’t experienced) how nice it is to read eInk for several hours instead of looking at a backlit display.
- When I saw the two pictures today of the iBook vs the Kindle I thought I would be drawn into the iBook. But even in the pictures the ink qualities looked entirely different and the kindle won for me. I use both the kindle app on my ipod touch and my kindle. The app is fine for short reading bursts if I’m at lunch or waiting in line somewhere but eventually begins to give me eye strain. Also – it’s HORRIBLE for reading in bed w/out a light on. The kindle wins out for reading in bed with a tiny book lame attached to it. So much better on my eyes.
- Bezos has said that the Kindle is meant to be the best device for the activity of reading only – if they tried to make it into anything else, there would be no matching the iPad.
- The question for me is whether Amazon want to build a business out of Kindle, or it was just to kick-start the e-books market.
  
  I suspect the intent was the latter, and they’ve largely been successful in that aim.
  
  My guess is I see my retailing capability as my biggest strength if I’m on Amazon, and I only see Kindle as a vehicle to keep some market share in order to push open standards, and to make sure doesn’t abuse its power with consumers and publishers.
  
  When Amazon develops its store front app for iPad, will Apple reject it… and what will the DOJ say?
- Not many people read anymore so I know I’m a minority in that regard but while my primary function would be reading I want the ability to annotate and access the internet for research.
  
  The kindle is a very limited device and again while the DX is such a definitive device it lacks versatility.
  
  The iPad just does a lot more and similar devices cost similar prices so the iPad beats out the Kindle for me.
  
  If you didn’t have to annotate or take your research to the net though I can understand a Kindle would serve you fine.
- Funny, I have both a Kindle and an iPhone and prefer reading on the iPhone. I think it’s color that makes the difference for me. Even with B&W text, color wins the day.
- The Kindle is a bit of a one-trick pony, but it does what it does very well. I think the loser here is more likely to be the Nook which got off to a slow start and barely has the brand to survive against the Kindle let alone Apple’s marketing muscle. The tiny touch screen and glitchy software will prove to be an extreme limit on the Nook especially given its channel partner plays and competition from other eBook readers.
- You’ve misunderstood the target: the iPad won’t kill the Kindle – it will kill the netbook.
  
  The problem I see for the iPad v Kindle- and it’s a big one – is the LED screen. You simply can’t read for hours without killing your eyes. But a LED screen gives you the ability to run movies, pictures, web surfing in glorious color. By contrast, the Kindle is not backlit and therefore is much more comfortable on the eyes.
- @Phil: But the eInk device gets to sit around twiddling its thumbs for a decade losing marketshare to the almost good enough (or futilely try developing things like an app market and platform, etc…) while the iPad kills the netbook (I agree but for sake of the argument, let’s just say this is your assertion), eat into the eInk device market little by little with the larger general audience rather than the niche market of diehards, AND … when the technologies DO converge, destroys the single-purpose eInk device market overnight without any further development or investment because all of the other capabilities are already there.
- Not so sure about that. I spend hours looking at LED, watching movies on it, writing code on it, playing games on it, etc. After several years of doing this on LED, and numerous years of doing it on competing technologies…. I’m not going blind. In fact, I stood more of a chance going blind while trying to get light to Kindle on a long plane trip and when I read in bed. People try to bag on backlit displays all the time, but then the first thing they end up buying is a light so they can read their book, or see the e-Ink display.
  
  I dunno… personally I’m not “seeing” the eye-killing effects of staring at screens all day. Then again, maybe I HAVE gone blind…
- Amazon should move the Kindle in the opposite direction of the iPad, not try to catch up. While the iPad becomes a replacement for the personal computer… Kindle should become a replacement for the paperback… focus on being the most thin, durable, drop dead simple and very inexpensive reader possible.
  
  The Kindle model should become more like the printer model… the unit becomes almost free and the money is made on the ink/toner, or in the Kindle’s case the money is made on the content.
- I am just hanging out for more specs. I’ve wanted a Kindle for a while, but have held out buying one to see what the tablet would be like. The Backlight and 10 hour battery life isn’t great, but really, if it turns out the tablet can support all the e-reading features of Kindle- like annotating books and PDF documents, exporting notes – then I will probably go the tablet anyway, just for the versatility.
- Though the iPad did not come as a surprise to Amazon (I hope), I think Amazon should scale down its ambitions in this space. The way I see it, Amazon has two options:
  
  1) Focus on ebooks (and some tertiary functions around that)
  2) Compete with Apple on iPad
  
  In option 1, Amazon will be playing to its strengths. In option 2, it will compete on Apple’s strengths. It will loose in option 2. It stands to make a pretty good business in option 1.
  
  So what does option 1 look like? A really long battery life, easy to read, fast download of books, books published only through Amazon (exclusive), exclusive content. Real ease of use internationally. Amazon should not forget its DNA and start chasing the next hot thing out there.
  
  If it were to compete in option 2, it will fare much worse than Google will/is in Android. Amazon can dedicate a couple of hundred millions tops to a program like this. It will completely take them away from being a retailer. They will act more like a VC/Incuabator than the biggest, baddest online retailer.
  
  With option 1, they could get a WW installed base of 20-30 million users over time (hardcore book readers) and make $200 per user in revenue and $50-60 in margin. If they start chasing Apple, they will be burning R&D money.
- As others before me have said, I don’t see the iPad as a Kindle Killer. The Kindle is an amazing book reader. I like that it doesn’t do more. I don’t want the distraction of being able to tweet or browse the web when I am reading. I have my laptop, desktop, blackberry and netbook to do that. Sure, the iPad might replace two or more of those items, but not my Kindle.
  
  You said “for the same price, more is better.” I couldn’t disagree more. It all depends on consumer desires. Personally, for the things that are most important for me, I want a specialized device. For the things that don’t matter as much, give me a d-it-all device.
  
  I believe the Kindle and the iPad can both thrive and I hope they will.
Video: The iPad In Action

tags: no_tag
- Now it works, thanks.
  
  Why the iPAD is a Winner and the bigger Game Changer :
  
  1)It’s the final convergence device
  2)Battery it’s critical for such pervasive device (10h outstanding)
  3)Price was the show stopper : 499 is amazing
  4)Camera could be an accessory
  5)Flash will be dead in 24 months (HTML5)
  6)iPad complements perfectly the iPhone, iPod, any Smartphone and any Laptop/Desktop
  7)Semi-multitasking to come with OS 4.0
- I was disappointed with the video. It’s basically a big iPhone screen.
  
  I couldn’t help think while I was watching the video : yep, tablets are awkward to hold. You have one hand simply doing the task of holding all the time. On a phone that’s acceptable because it sits in the palm of one hand and is comfortable. In the video the guy didn’t look very comfortable holding as he was – I can see that being very tiring.
- The major reason the Iphone doesn’t multitask is battery life. That won’t change because of 4.0 so don’t expect 4.0 to bring multitasking.
- It looks great and seems to work really nicely.
  
  Multitasking is unnecessary on it, just like it is on the iPhone, and is one of the reasons why it is such a success – anyone can use it and be productive and quick with it. Being able to switch between apps that launch really quickly is just as effective. And it makes it more reliable, it makes the current running app faster, and it means it is less complicated for users.
  
  If you enabled multitasking of apps, then you need to be able to switch between them quickly, and suddenly you need a memory monitor so the user knows what is going on when it starts grinding to a halt because you are leaving a trail of open apps behind you, you then start to need to enable virtual memory which then means lots of writes to the same region of flash which over time degrades the flash (although I might be wrong on that these days).
  
  All in all, IMO Apple have made an excellent design decision, and it is one of the reasons I believe they have been so successful. There just isn’t any setup, any messing around, any expert knowledge required to be an effective user of an iPod Touch/iPhone/iPad. They just work.
As Publishers Try To Adapt To The iPad, Startups Spring To The Rescue

tags: no_tag
- So what exactly can the platform add beyond the text these publishers already have? CEO Matt MacInnis says that Inkling is building tools that give publishers a scalable way to add interactive and dynamic content. They’ll be able to include interactive figures and quizzes. And they’ll be able to give their texts cloud connectivity, allowing students to download new, updated content. Other benefits from connecting to the cloud include the ability to sync your work between multiple devices, and the ability to add social features to a text. Imagine if you had a question about a particular diagram in your text; you could send it to your professor, and they could leave an annotation in the book that would be visible to all other students.
- Give me text books and the ability to write notes on certain pages of the book with out leaving it, and i’ll be sold, as long as they have a wide selection of college books.
The Little Notepad that Might

tags: note
- First, it had to have a cleaner, more Mac-like UI. Notational Velocity’s current interface is purely functional. It’s efficient and stays out of your way. Unfortunately, it’s ugly, too. It no longer fits in with the UI polish users expect in 2009. I’m not a designer by any stretch of the imagination, but I did make some common sense changes that make the interface friendlier. I replaced the current search box with a native Mac search field and removed any unnecessary padding around the UI elements. I gave the note field a legal pad treatment (inspired by The Hit List), enabled rich text editing, and replaced the “Date Created” column with a more useful “Date Modified” one. Also, since the goal of Nottingham (and NV) is to be totally keyboard navigable, I put a lot of thought into which shortcut keys I kept and which ones I altered. One of those changes was making the up and down arrow keys behave more naturally as they move through the list of notes and into / out of the search field.
FutureTap » One year after the acquisition: was it all worth it?

tags: iPhone, data
- It turns out, Where To? is not the kind of rocket-like app that flies through the roof and then crashes on the hard surface of negligible sales. Since the takeover in mid December 2008, it made a total of $325.055,07 in gross sales, that’s $227.538,55 after Apple’s cut:
- While in the first half of the year we had decent success with cost-per-click campaigns such as Google Adwords, in the recent past virtually all sorts of paid advertising were totally ineffective (with Admob and Facebook offering the worst value in terms of ad dollars spent per sale). The root of the problem is that at a sale price of $2.99 ($2.10 after Apple’s cut) and typical click-to-sale conversion rates of 5-10% the maximum affordable CPC is at around 10-15¢. For apps priced lower than $2.99 or promotional offers the maximum CPC is even less. At this level, however, the available inventory is nearly non-existant.
- I feel the most effective marketing are continued improvement, word of mouth and of course positive reviews both in the App Store (yes, you’re welcome to take this as friendly reminder to review Where To? and all your favorite apps you use everyday – Thanks!) and in the press (e.g. TUAW or iPhoneFootprint). After releasing new versions, Where To? achieved rankings in the top 50 of all paid apps in the US, #2 in Germany and it climbed up to the top position in the Navigation category in the US, Germany and other countries. Clearly, this strategy wasn’t too bad.
- Thanks for the write-up. Marketing an iPhone app at $2.99 a pop is definitely a challenge. I was interested to read your comment about the conversion rates of Google AdWords campaigns: “Admob and Facebook offering the worst value in terms of ad dollars spent per sale”. How were you able to work out which clicks converted into sales? The best I’ve been able to do is use the iTunes Linkshare links in ads in the US and UK with the “signature tracking codes” so I can see clicks and sales but is there something else I’ve not heard of? Would love any extra tips for tracking sales and advertising. For any none Linkshare the best I can do is throw a lot of money at it and look at daily sales for a deflection!
Games from Within | Making A Living (Barely) On The iPhone App Store (aka The Numbers Post)

tags: no_tag
- The first thing that you’ll notice is that Flower Garden is a strange in-between app. It’s far from being very successful or being at the top of any chart, but at the same time it probably made more money than 99% of the apps on the App Store. It was also reelased on April 10th, so this represents 10 months of data, an age after which most apps are usually on drip support. So this should be an interesting new data point.
- The vertical axis is daily profit in US $ (after Apple’s 30% cut). Flower Garden generated a bit over $21,500 over a period of 10 months. I would hardly consider that an entry-level salary, much less in California, but it’s enough for someone without a family or mortgage to (barely) make a living.
- There’s clearly a story behind that graph. It’s not the usual exponential drop off you expect from most (unsuccessful apps) and shows how an aging app can pick up steam on its own after many months on the store, without ever being featured by Apple.
- I also contacted all the media sites I knew with a press release and promo codes to entice them to write a review. I was lucky that many reviews appeared over the next couple of weeks, but unfortunately they were all spread out, minimizing the PR effect. The biggest effect was when Flower Garden was simultaneously covered on TouchArcade and MacRumors. That’s what caused the big sales spike (B). From there, it was a standard exponential drop off, until, on the last day of the month, just three weeks after launch, revenue dropped below $100/day again. If that was all there was to it, Flower Garden was a big flop and I should start dusting off my resume.
- Mother’s day is probably the small, second spike in that period, but overall, that week was a loss. Lesson learned: Don’t make a sale unless your app is in a visible position (on a top chart somewhere). Flower Garden was nowhere to be seen, so the sale had no effect other than to cut profits by 33%.
- In early June we launched App Treasures. App Treasures is a label for indie iPhone game developers with top-quality games, and one of the main tools we’re leveraging is some cross-promotion for our games, both through the web site, and from an in-game view liking to each other’s games.
- At the same time, every time I would show the game to someone, they usually really liked it. Not liked-it-because-I’m-there, but really, genuinely liked it. Why weren’t more people buying it then? Two problems: First, screenshots were not conveying how cool growing, animated flowers you could touch were, and second, most people didn’t even know Flower Garden existed. It had never been featured by Apple on the App Store, and the audience I was trying to reach didn’t read TouchArcade or other iPhone review sites.
- The first thing I did was to add Facebook integration. Not only could you send bouquets through email, but you were able to send them directly to your Facebook friends. The advantage of that approach from my point of view is that all your friends also saw the flowers so for every bouquet sent on Facebook, hopefully dozens or hundreds of people were being exposed to Flower Garden. The result on sales: Not much. Maybe it made the early part of July a little higher than it would have been otherwise, but no noticeable difference.
  
  The second approach was to release a lite version of Flower Garden in early September. I was confident that Flower Garden was a good app, and I was hoping that once people had a chance to try the lite version, they would purchase the full version. Fortunately I was right and the effect on sales was very noticeable, pretty much doubling sales (E), but it never really took off in any significant way, and sales slowly declined over time.
- This time it was in-app purchases (IAP). Apple had announced IAP back in June. They seemed like a very natural fit for Flower Garden, but given how few units Flower Garden had sold, I would have a very limited audience for IAP. A small percentage of a small number is a tiny number! However, in late October Apple announced that IAP were finally allowed from free apps as well. That encouraged me to give Flower Garden one… last… try…
- Afterwards revenue flattened out, but at a much higher amount than before. Before IAP, daily revenue was about $50/day. Now it’s more around $180/day. That’s totally beyond any of my expectations!
- It looks like sales for Flower Garden (blue) continue to be more or less the same, with a slight increase after Christmas. The IAP from the full version of Flower Garden (green) account for most of the extra revenue, especially at the beginning. But it’s very interesting that the purchases coming from Flower Garden Free (orange) are steadily increasing and, as of last week, they became almost as large as the ones from the full version.
- But, as soon as the in-app Flower Shop was released, downloads started climbing, and on Christmas day they went through the roof (relatively speaking). So it’s no surprise that IAP from Flower Garden Free picked up in these last few weeks.
- George, in the case of Flower Garden, I’m convinced that most profits will eventually come from IAP because of Flower Garden Free (that’s the version I’m pushing most these days). I’m definitely planning on adding more items to the store, so hopefully it will continue the trend. Biggest win for me right now would be to get more folks to know about and try out Flower Garden Free though.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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My daily readings 01/27/2010

January 27, 2010

Philip Guo – Geek behaviors present during conversations

tags: no_tag
- Normal turn-taking behavior occurs when both participants in a
  conversation transition smoothly from listening to talking, and then
  back again. When a socially-adept person talks, he is constantly
  monitoring the other person’s facial gestures and body language, and
  when he senses that the other person wants to chime in, he dials down
  his own talking and allows the other person to begin speaking.
- Normal turn-taking behavior occurs when both participants in a
  conversation transition smoothly from listening to talking, and then
  back again. When a socially-adept person talks, he is constantly
  monitoring the other person’s facial gestures and body language, and
  when he senses that the other person wants to chime in, he dials down
  his own talking and allows the other person to begin speaking.
  
  When a non-geek is talking to a geek, awkward silences often arise
  because the geek doesn’t pay enough attention to his partner’s attention
  level and doesn’t know the appropriate way and time to naturally pause.
FunMail’s Picture Messaging App Launches On Android

tags: no_tag
- Similar to the iPhone app, FunMail for Android allows users blasts their text into the application, which then breaks down whatever the user typed for context. FunMail’s learning technology “Media Brain” will return a handful of context-related graphics (pulled from Creative Commons sources and their own user-generated library), with your original text. The user picks the graphic they want, and off it goes via SMS, Facebook, or Twitter. In addition, FunMail leverage’s Google’s voice-recognition and transcription technology, enabling consumers to turn spoken messages into images that can be shared.
Acer Launching App Store for Windows, Android, Windows Mobile and Chrome

tags: app, store
- Although application stores are typically associated with mobile phones, Acer wouldn’t be the first vendor to launch an applications store designed for use on PCs. Earlier this month, chip maker Intel launched the AppUp site, an application store designed specifically for the netbook computers. Interestingly enough, AppUp is meant to be a white-label offering that PC manufacturers can customize to their own needs. At the time of its launch at this year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Intel announced several partnerships with other PC makers to bring the AppUp store to consumers. Included among those launch partners was Acer. Gianpiero Morbello, Acer’s worldwide marketing VP said that by accessing the AppUp catalog, their company would be able to distribute “innovative software downloads to Acer Atom processor-based netbook customers and move to easily support additional Acer customers on any device powered by an Intel processor.”
- While it’s understandable that Acer wants to generate some hype surrounding their products by offering an app store to their customers, at this point they’re simply confusing the issue. Many of the platforms Acer plans to support already offer their own application stores – even Google’s Chrome OS, the Web-based operating system set to launch by year-end. And one could argue that the Internet itself has been the app store for Windows computers for many years now.
Education and New Media Collaborative Conference Application – Adobe Education Leaders

tags: no_tag
Customer Feedback & Ideas for DotGov

tags: ideas
Clip Mobile iPhone App Launches for Canadians | iPhone in Canada Blog – Tips, Tricks, News, and Tutorials for Canadian iPhone Users

tags: coupon
- iPhone users can download the free Clip Mobile app from the App Store. From there, Clip Mobile will find coupons near you based on your location, or whatever you’re searching for. All the coupons within their database are 100% legit–why? Because Clip Mobile goes directly to businesses for coupons. You will never have to bare the shame of trying to use an illegitimate coupon ever again.
Google strikes back at Apple, releases new Google Voice for iPhone | ITworld

tags: no_tag
- Google’s new Voice Web app enables iPhone users to dial phone numbers and make calls via an on-screen, in-browser keypad. It also allows the checking of voice-mail in the browser. When calls are made via the app, people who receive the calls see the call coming from the Google Voice phone number, not the iPhone’s. It accesses and can make calls from the Google online Contacts app, but not from the iPhone’s Contacts app.
  
  Although it’s a Web app, it looks and feels like a regular iPhone app, for the most part. When you press the Safari browser’s “plus sign,” and choose “Add to Home Screen,” it places a nice icon there, rather than a miniature version of the Web page, as most Web links do.
iLime For Quick & Easy, Apple iPhone Developer Push Notifications & In App Purchase Services

tags: iPhone, push, in-app
- iLime by KeyLimeTie can help you implement both these services with ease and no upfront cost. iLime is a scalable, easy-to-implement solution for integrating Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) and In App Purchase content for your iPhone application customers.
Wish Idea for A Killer Contact App | THE CHRIS VOSS SHOW

tags: contact, twitter, idea
Op-Ed Columnist – Is China an Enron? (Part 2) – NYTimes.com

tags: no_tag
- “Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important,” says Hagel. “Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside.” And in today’s flat world, you can now access them all. Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don’t, others will.
- That is what the war over Google is really all about: It is a proxy and a symbol for whether the Chinese will be able to freely search and connect wherever their imaginations and creative impulses take them, which is critical for the future of Network China.
- So there you have it: Command China, which wants to censor Google, is working against Network China, which thrives on Google. For now, it looks as if Command China will have its way. If that turns out to be the case, then I’d like to short the Communist Party.
Platform Wars: Twitter’s Chirp Conference Will Take Place A Week Before Facebook’s f8

tags: twitter
- Day 1 of the Twitter conference will take place at the Palace of Fine Arts Theater. This day will contain the meat of the schedule. Highlighted talking points include OAuth, streaming, geolocation, business strategies, mobile integration, and the product roadmap. Right now, the only highlighted speakers include Twitter co-founders Evan Williams and Biz Stone as well as COO Dick Costolo and Sarver, but you can expect more to be added. Day 2 will see the event move to the Herbst Pavilion in Fort Mason for a 24-hour “Hack Day” for Twitter third-party developers. Naturally, there will also be a big party after the conference with “free beer, food and music all night long.” No word on any performers yet, but you can be sure that much like f8, Twitter will bring in some big names to make their community happy.

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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My daily readings 01/26/2010

January 26, 2010

Hacker News | Google Reader Can Now Track Changes to Any Website – Even Without a Feed

tags: no_tag
- This has been around for years, through RSSpect (http://www.rsspect.com/) by the wonderful Ryan North.
- Hmmm, I’ve been working on something like this for a little while now. I guess I’ll get to find out what it’s like to compete with Google at something.
  (I deleted the ragecomment I left immediately after reading this earlier, sorry)
How To Produce Like A Linchpin By Understanding Your Lizard Brain – with Seth Godin | Mixergy – Online Business Tips from Successful Entrepreneurs

tags: no_tag
- That’s why I kept digging in this interview. I want you (and me too, frankly) to be able to produce the kind of hits that Seth Godin keeps cranking out, seemingly without breaking a sweat. Not only has Seth created 2 big hit businesses, but he’s a writer who keeps introducing ideas that shape the way people think.
Woman Uses iPhone App to Get Pregnant

tags: iphone
- Last week we learned that your iPhone can save your life, this week, it turns out that it can create life as well. Bryce, who desperately wanted a child, told The Sun: “It began to weigh heavily on us. We were considering IVF and adoption when [my husband] Dudley gave me the iPhone for my 30th. I typed in ‘get pregnant’ and downloaded five apps.”
  
  The young wife chose The Free Menstrual Calendar [iTunes Link], which highlighted in bright pink her most fertile day. She got pregnant two months after downloading the app, and gave birth on the exact day that it predicted.
There’s always a way to make it better

tags: no_tag
- It only takes one idea to build a great business. Keep looking for yours (and don’t make it too complicated).
Killer Wine App | Drinking Out Loud | News & Features | Wine Spectator

tags: no_tag
- As one-time manure salesman (I kid you not) Arthur “Red” Motley proclaimed, “Nothing happens until somebody sells something.” Beyond the bulk level, where price is the sole attraction, wines sell when there’s a story. It’s as simple as that. And somebody has got to tell (or should I say “sell”?) that story.
- Another alternative is something called mobile image recognition, still in its youth (though Google’s December introduction of its Google Goggles visual search app for Android phones may soon bring it into the mainstream). Here again, you would use your cell phone camera and focus on the wine label. The image is sent as a picture to software that matches it to a pre-existing image in a database. Then the content—the story, if you will—linked to that image is instantly sent back to your cell phone.
  
  Interestingly, you can get the critics’ side of the story much more easily. For example, WineSpectator.com offers its subscribers Wine Spectator Mobile, which is a version of WineSpectator.com optimized for Internet-enabled smartphones, PDAs and other mobile devices.
  
  The key point is that wineries and retailers are simply not doing the sell job. They’re waiting for others (magazines, critics, bloggers, newspapers, word-of-mouth) to do the job for them.
How ‘The Hidden Brain’ Does The Thinking For Us : NPR

tags: bain
8 Usability Lessons Learned from Members | KartMe

tags: usability
Android Search, Text-To-Speech On Android 2.0 Donut (VIDEO) | Android Phone Fans

tags: no_tag
Cupcake Voice Recognition Now Available for Testing – Android and Me

tags: Voice, recognition, speech
- Note that the processing is not CPU intensive on the phone, but it will need to be sent to Google to be turned into text (thanks to Tim H for pointing this out on the last article). You’ll need a good internet connection for this. I found EDGE (non-3G data connection) to be a bit unreliable. About half got sent back with a connection error. That will definitely vary, but the worst case scenario is not good, especially if you’re trying to use this for possibly frustrating operations like speaking commands to your GPS navigation system. WiFi works much better and the results are fast.
Speech Recognition in Android SDK 1.5 | 4 Feet Software

tags: Voice, recognition
- The preview release of Android SDK 1.5 has generated a lot of interest, with one rather unnoticed but very exciting feature being speech recognition. In this post we’re having a closer look at what the library offers and and how to use it.
- Update: The guys at androidandme have published an app and an article evaluating the speech recognition feature. The voice is first recorded and sent to Google, which then sends the transcription back to the phone, hence this feature is not real-time and requires a good network connection, but gets pretty good results that way.
Hacker News | Ask HN: Review my site — socialreader.net

tags: News, aggregators
iPod Touch : 10 Cool Productivity Apps For Offline Use

tags: apps, productivity, offline
Deconstructing Google Mobile’s Voice Search on the iPhone – Waxy.org

tags: Voice, recognition
- Gummi Hafsteinsson, product manager for Google’s Voice Search, says, “I can confirm that we split the audio down to a smaller byte stream, which is then sent to Google for recognition, but we can’t really provide any details beyond that.” Responding to my request for a public API, he added, “I appreciate the suggestion to provide voice recognition as a service. Right now we have nothing to announce, but we’ll take this feedback as we look at future product ideas.”
- Next step: As Paul discovered in the comments, the Legal Notices page says clearly that the app uses the open-source Speex codec for voice encoding. Can anyone capture and decode the audio being sent to Google?
What’s A Startup? First Principles. « Steve Blank

tags: startup

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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My daily readings 01/25/2010

January 25, 2010

Black Hat SEO Case Study: How Mahalo Makes Black Look White! | SEO Book.com

tags: SEO

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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My daily readings 01/24/2010

January 24, 2010

iPhone PPTP VPN –> DNS resolution does not work! [Archive] – Mac Forums

tags: pptp, vpn, iphone, DNS
- Hey all,
  
  I’m trying to access a company intranet website through my company’s VPN. We have a simple PPTP VPN server. (MS Server 2k3)
  
  I’m able to connect fine. I’m able to browse to one of our intranet sites via IP address fine. But I cannot browse using hostnames or fully qualified domain names. (FQDNs) All of this si being done through Safari obviously.
  
  Therefore, this means there is a DNS resolution issue. In VPN settings, I’ve tried setting “Send all traffic” to both on and off, and neither works. (should be on though)
  
  Has anyone else got this to work using either PPTP or even L2TP? (and not CISCO)
- I was just doing a search for the solution to the exact same problem. I can use IP addresses to go where I want on the network once VPN is established but I cannot use DNS – which is ideally what I need.
  
  My router is a Vigor (so again no Cisco) and I connect using PPTP. Be nice to have some help on this!!
Learn from my misery: Don’t buy a nook. – Massively Parallel Procrastination

tags: no_tag

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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My daily readings 01/23/2010

January 23, 2010

AppSalesGraph: Open Source iPhone App Sales Grapher

tags: app, store, Opensource

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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My daily readings 01/22/2010

January 22, 2010

Mingle + Google Wave for Project Collaboration | ThoughtWorks Studios

tags: wave, collaboration
Hillary Clinton Extends Foreign Policy To The Internet And Wants Your Help

tags: no_tag
- The freedom to connect – the idea that governments should not prevent people from connecting to the internet, to websites, or to each other. The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly in cyber space.
- Ultimately, this issue isn’t just about information freedom; it’s about what kind of world we’re going to inhabit. It’s about whether we live on a planet with one internet, one global community, and a common body of knowledge that unites and benefits us all. Or a fragmented planet in which access to information and opportunity is dependent on where you live and the whims of censors.
Box.net Launches Flash-Based Universal File Viewer, Saves You Some Headaches

tags: no_tag
- Last year, Box.net acquired a small company called Increo without giving much insight as to what they’d be doing with the technology. Today, we’re seeing the fruits of that acquisition: Box.net is launching a new integrated Flash file viewer, allowing users to immediately view over 20 file types from their browser, including most common document formats, images (including Photoshop), audio, and video.
- Aside from the viewer, Box has been showing strong growth over the last year. CEO Aaron Levie says that in 2009, Box’s reveneue from its enterprise offerings grew by 500%, and the service is now up to 3.5 million users with over 100 million files stored. The company now staffs 70 employees. Levie recently wrote a guest post for us describing how the enterprise is moving to the cloud (and obviously Box is one player looking to welcome them).
王兴：生活还是得继续_互联网_科技时代_新浪网

tags: no_tag
- 　　C: 你觉得自己现在了解规则了吗？
  
  　　W: 这个不敢说。就算你觉得自己了解了，规则永远在变化。
- 　　C: 你觉得现在自己了解你所说的游戏规则了吗？
  
  　　H: 当我看到的时候就了解了。看不到的，我还是不了解。
- 　H: 当我看到的时候就了解了。看不到的，我还是不了解。

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

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Strange Kite

Archive for January, 2010

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