Is Apple About To Do It Again?

There is no question that Apple upset the Apple Cart (pun intended) when they released the iPhone. While Microsoft pretends to insist it's a numbers game, i.e. more units shipped - the reality is they got spanked. It's not just that the iPhone took a huge chunk of market share - it's that the iPhone is without question one of the most useful pieces of personal tech ever invented. My iPhone is my swiss army knife. I use it to check the temperature outside, check the market, find places I'm going to, buy stuff from Amazon, listen to AC/DC's new album (yeah I had to rip it in iTunes), and -oh yeah- call my Mom. It is the best piece of tech I've bought to date. I base that statement mostly on how beaten up the blue plastic case is.

Now rumors are a-flying that Apple is going to get into the netbook market. But are they? They are ordering Netbook parts according to the gadget sites but what if they are NOT going to make a netbook? One of the reported components is a touch screen. What if instead of making a tiny laptop they are going to make an oversized iPhone? Apple is announcing a new iPhone OS on March 17th. What if that OS is also going to run on the new Apple iPad? Now one final speculation, what if they are going to competively price it?

It could be another massive upset to the apple cart. Especially if they make it as sturdy as the iPhone. My mother can barely work her Windows laptop - it's bewildering to her. I know she could work an iPhone even though she's too cheap to buy one. The iPhone applications are straightforward and easy to use. It's an icon/list based environment that is free of the clutter and constant popups covering the stuff you are trying to work on. It's not overly helpful and very simple and intuitive.

A successful iPad would really rock if it supported a bluetooth keyboard (why doesn't the iPhone?). I can easily see lots of people sitting watching TV and using an iPad to check the TV listings, stay on Facebook, catch up on the news, or read an iBook.

If they make it sturdy enough for educational use, it could be disastrous to competitors. The iPhone is feature complete enough to be an lifelong educational tool but it's too small a form factor for that purpose. Data entry is clunky and no copy and paste. Plus no one knows yet with certainty about the health issues related to cell phone signal (or so the phone companies say).

Apple has a chance to do it again. It's a long shot, in all their years they've only had a few milestones - the Mac, the iPod, and the iPhone. They also price their hardware above the rest so if Apple makes a regular form factor Netbook at an $899 price, they'll only sell to their regular die hard customers. The netbook is entrenched at the $375 - $425 price point and that even drops some from time to time. My Acer Aspire One had dropped to $319 at Amazon last time I looked.

An innovative Apple product could dent netbook sales, annhilate the Kindle 2 (which will no doubt run on the iPad), and catch new users at their earliest exposure to tech (kindergarten).

So will they innovate or renovate? We will see.

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SecondLife IS the Social Media

SecondLife (or SL for short) is definitely a love/hate kind of virtual environment. Literally just about anything you can imagine you can find in full 3D glory in SecondLife. That can be something cool like a Kansas wheat field, or the Eiffel Tower or something more on the fringe of society like PonyGirls, or Gor. Many people come to SecondLife for a few days and decide it is a waste of time, blog about it, and completely miss the better parts of the environment.

This is further complicated by the owners at Linden Lab don't seem to really get the utility of their own product. It's utility as a business prototyping environment got tossed because it was positioned as a way to reach a lot of people which is not really accurate because it has scaling issues for number of "agents" (or avatar or resident) They also won't give up the free to play, which keeps the population and resources of the program tied up with folks who bring no buying power to the world . That's not a bad thing in and of itself, the problem comes in when the free account is a "bot" (a humanless avatar) that is there using resource to artificially boost a place's ratings.

The biggest mistake of all that Linden Labs is making is that they did not position SecondLife as social media when social media became the "catch phrase" of Web bloggers elite. There really is no more social Internet program than SecondLife.

In Facebook, you can write on someone's walls. In SecondLife you can take them to a live music concert, buy them a virtual pizza, and then go back to your place for a chat or a voice conversation. On Facebook you can find your existing friends, in SecondLife you can make completely new friends from all over the globe. On Facebook you can make plans to go horseback riding or sailing that requires gasoline powered travel in the real world, while in SecondLife you can instantly teleport to the ocean and hop in the boat and off you go.

Finally, on Facebook if you say something wrong you could upset a real nutjob who has probably enough information to find you and make you miserable. In SecondLife your real identity is disintermediated and you can do and say what you like with a reasonable assurance there will be no real-life downside.

SecondLife has no more of a learning curve than Facebook, and even though it requires the installation of separate viewer - it's simple enough. If you make connections with the right people and show a little respect, you will find lots of folks ready to help you get on your feet inside the world.

The downside of SecondLife is you need to be careful and go slow. The identity disintermediation that frees you to express yourself without repercussions, also allows the less savory folks to engage in predatory behavior. Put simply, the metaverse, just like the universe, has it's share of metajerks. So if you know going it to take everything you hear with a very large grain of salt you should be fine.

So knowing that Linden Labs should have positioned SecondLife as social media and didn't what prescriptive steps could they take?

1. Update the webbased profiles of SL residents to have more Facebookish/MySpacey features like the ability to add friends, comments, notes, and links to Google calendaring.

2. Contact the folks at Flock (the social web browser) and work out a way to include your SecondLife identity in the people section. Many, many residents also use Flickr and Youtube so intersecting them through Flock will give SL broader exposure and communicate some of the depth of the experience.

3. Start calling SecondLife social media. Just like Howard Stern declared himself "the king of all media" and it stuck, SecondLife needs to take the first step and declare itself social media or at least virtual social media.

4. Play to your limits. The fact that there is roughly a 100 avatar limit in sims (shorthand for "simulator" - a plot of virtual land) doesn't have to be a scaling handicap in a social environment. Focus on marketing to smaller groups with a common interest, i.e. a social network.

5. Make the support system more open, allowing residents to read complaints and respond/vote for them. There is an obtuse system now that only the hardcore users understand and it does not include complaints about residents. Make the police blotter more visible so other residents can be more informed and be better armed to deal with the handful of megajerks that are souring the soup.

6. Finally, with increased success, it becomes very important to consider limiting access for the free accounts. Whether this means log time limits, or travel restrictions, the time has come to consider putting restraints on the free accounts especially considering many of them are nothing more than bots - a humanless avatar that is there merely to raise a parcels ratings or collect camping money.

SecondLife like almost everything has the power to be something really realy good or something really really bad but the good that it does I believe as a going on 3 year resident far outweighs the bad. I want to see SecondLife continue to succeed. In that time I have developed deep friendships with people who, though I have never met in flesh and blood, are very "real" to me.

Positioning, or more accurately recognizing, SecondLife as viable social media could be key to regrowing the success that has faded since real world businesses have left SL.

Menu Planning in Heaven

If you are planning to go to heaven and wonder what's on the menu. Here's a clue.

A Simple Idea On Pay

Okay a CEO making a million dollars a year while going to conventions, fancy luncheons, corporate jet rides, not to mention probably having an executive staff to do most of the heavy lifting compared to slapping two pieces of beef between a bun for minimum wage would be an easy choice for anyone as far as future employment goes. The pay descrepancy is a tad mind boggling when you consider the difference. I've only been exposed to a handful of CEOs in my lifetime but they were all clearly in it for themselves and only only one worked hard to get it.

Most of the low paying people I've known had two basic problems. They hadn't had the education and they didn't have the heart (or lack thereof) to be the landsharks you need to be to be a truly megasuccessful CEO.

So how do you resolve the pay problem? Why does being pampered like the royalty of a small country pay so much more than wading through chicken guts? Well partly because the wealthy influence how you think, but also because there is no simple metric you can apply to determine what a job should pay - well at least one that we are using. Until now.

I propose that pay be based on calories burned per hour.

That's right. If you sit on your ass all day in front of a computer you won't make as much as that waitress running back and forth taking crap off of irate customers. If your life is filled with jets and limos and work-paid-for meals - well you could end up owing money because you are taking in MORE calories than you are burning. That's right NO pay for going to the gym AFTER work.

Now you may say this would be nearly impossible to implement but every piece of exercise equipment I've bought and ignored in the past few months has a dohicky you clip on your finger or your ear lobe to tell how many calories you are burning. So this should be cake.

Think about it.

More Musings on the Kindle 2

I got my kindle 2 last week and started using it. While just by the sheer volume of books alone (pun intended) I don't think it will ever replace books - it certainly will eventually "contain" all of them. As the market grows, publishers will be foolish not to offer kindle editions of their books. So today you can't get ALL of your books electronically - some day soon you will.

The kindle 2, especially with the (now optional) leather cover, is just like reading a book - only a little better. For those of you who really really love the smell and feel of a real book (which I can understand?..not really) - do this. Go buy an old smelly book at a garage sale. Cut out the center of the pages and drop your kindle in like smuggling contraband. You'll get the tactile olfactory joys of book reading and the advantage of kindle reading.

I've been reading Stephen King's "UR", the kindle novel. In it, the main character Wesley loves books. He has tons of them. And that brought to mind perhaps one of the most attractive features of the kindle. Moving day. I've moved off to college and back from college and from a couple of cities before. Always the problem was books. They are heavy, take of lots of space, and the more you have the worse off you are. The penalty of being intellectual and a free-spirit. By distilling books down to the essence of the words they are, the kindle saves your back. Now moving day is tossing your kindle along with your netbook into your bag and going.

I find reading to be mentally stimulating in a very different way. Video games, TV, even surfing the web seem more passive and overlystimulating. The last one, web surfing, is like a mine field filled with the temptation to stop and throw coconuts at a monkey. If the web is a Red Bull, then the kindle is a nice chai latte.

One feature that I found I use a lot more than I thought is the dictionary. Being able to look up the meaning of a word without moving is really great.

Amazon has consistently under promised and over delivered in my experience and the kindle 2 is no exception. The kindle experience is as good as the smelly book experience to me, maybe even better. I would like to find a kindle kondom of silicon to make it beach and poolside worthy soon.

One of the most impressive features I found on the kindle was Amazon's non-proprietariness (not a real word I know). You can download content from other websites to your kindle and read it. Amazon seems more interested in providing you with a useful tool to read with than a locked-down ad-slathering add-on-requiring snarky system like other folks have made. It is a really open platform compared to many other digital systems.

The kindle 2 is going to distance Amazon from the other reader makers, while providing a solid platform to grow this market.

Kindle Unboxing Video

I was going to make an unboxing video of my Kindle 2 arriving but I found this one made by a PetSmart employee and I don't see how I could top it.

So I got my Kindle today and in fact there is a picture of dude sitting next to a tree cloud and I don't like my gadgets shiny either.

Some of the other nominees were:

Best Kindle 2 Unbox Video Shot While Hand Holding the Camera (Bruckheimer style)

Best Kindle 2 Unbox Video of a Kindle Purchased Off Of eBay While Drinking Beer

More on the KIndle 2 as I discover it.

Palm Pre Points to Future Tech

The new Palm Pre is a super wow phone. It has one key breakthrough concept which is constancy of contact even as you switch mediums or platforms. You can watch a brief video of it here and you find a compendium of information at Engadget.

The important thing about the Pre is it's WebOS. The Palm Pre uses Javascript and CSS for it's mobile programming language. That's all you need to know to develop applications for the WebOS platform. If you watch the demos you will notice there isn't much in terms of day-to-day tasks you can't do. I don't think anybody would want to write Photoshop in Javascript (except maybe Adobe) but for the daily use glue apps that we all use everyday email, tv listings, calendar, picking out music, jotting down a note, etc. Javascript and CSS can probably handle it just fine. In fact, the Pre looks great.

The Pre points to the future. Clearly, Javascript and CSS has come into it's own as an application development technology. So much so that it seems that it might be all you need for average business application development.

The Pre also leverages an old concept into a new package. Back in the day, one of the great for the rest of us programming applications was HyperCard. In Hypercard you built "stacks" of "cards" with events attached to elements on the card. It had a spiffy english like programming language called HyperTalk. The new Palm Pre brings back the idea of cards but now they are shuffled into a deck. It's still a compelling metaphor. The cards also represent a significant of amount of connectivity power with some of the apps being pretty wild mashups.

Check out the Pre, it's pretty exciting renovaton and even a little innovative.