The REAL transformative package: iPad plus wireless keyboard

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The iPad has changed my life. It feels like I have been waiting for it since I became conscious.

However the iPad alone doesn’t do the job. It is the iPad together with a wireless keyboard that has transformed my life.

Two years ago tomorrow I wrote a blog post saying It is totally INSANE that you cannot use an external keyboard on an iPhone. For some completely inane reason Apple crippled the Bluetooth on the iPhone so it couldn’t be used for external keyboards.
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Apple subscriptions vs Google One Pass subscriptions – comparison and analysis for publishers

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The lovely pace of change in the media world isn’t slowing down any…

One day after Apple launched its long-expected subscription service, Google announced its One Pass content payment system. Here is a quick comparison.

– What they are
They are both payment and delivery platforms for content sales and subscriptions.

– Delivery platforms
Apple’s platform is for content delivered to apps that are sold in the Apple iTunes store, so only to iPad, iPhone and iTouch products.
Google OnePass works on any web or mobile platform (not just Android) as long as it is permitted in the terms (i.e. it cannot be used on Apple devices)

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Will tablets take over enterprise work? More than half of large companies say yes

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It wasn’t long ago that one of the most solid and unquestioned assumptions of enterprise software was that users sat at a desk in front of a desktop (or sometimes laptop) computer. As such, maintaining a fleet of almost exclusively Windows-based computers was sometimes a larger task than selecting, developing, and running the enterprise software on which work was performed.

The rise of tablet computing, still less than a year now from when the iPad first become available, may significantly change that scenario. Morgan Stanley has just released the results of a survey showing that 51% of CIOs of large organizations expect to be buying tablets for their staff within a year, with another 16% expecting to support staff using their own tablets on the company’s network.


Source: Digital Daily, Morgan Stanley
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BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) plus Indonesia are where internet and mobile are exploding

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Doyen of internet analysis Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has provided some great data and insights in her presentation at Web 2.0 today. She has framed it around 10 questions Internet executives should ask themselves (and answer). The full deck is well worth going through – I have put that at the bottom of the post – but I wanted to highlight a couple of her slides on globalization of the internet and mobile.

BRIC_MorganStanley.jpg

Almost half of the people in the world using the internet are in five countries: the US plus the BRIC countries of Brazil, Russia, India, and China). The US is close to full penetration, though there is still a little further to go, and the pace of growth in Brazil is slow despite only being at 39% penetration – this is likely to increase. Where there is undoubtedly extraordinary potential for growth is in China, where internet usage is soaring, and India, where growth hasn’t yet started to properly ramp up. Russia, while not as populous as its neighbors, still has plenty of scope of growth. In short, these five countries will soon account for significantly more than half of the world’s internet population.

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iPad swiftly becomes the dominant medium for reading and entertainment

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Very interesting results out from a survey by Cooper Murphy Webb of British iPad users:

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Source: Cooper Murphy Webb

The study of 1034 iPad users in the UK showed that 31% prefer reading magazines and newspapers on their iPad, followed by 26% on their laptop/ computer and 24% on print.

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The 12 key elements of iPad media strategy

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iPadmedia.jpgOn August 27 in Sydney The Insight Exchange is running an iPad Strategy Workshop as part of the Newspaper Publishers Association Future Forum conference. It is free for PANPA members and very inexpensive for others, including discounts for members of industry partners, so if you’re in Sydney I hope to see you there. See here for full details and registration.

It will be highly compressed event, packing much content, action and participation into two hours. One of the highlights will be the panel discussion with a group which has extensive experience and insights to share, including:

Keith Ahern, CEO, mogeneration

Grant Holloway, Managing Editor – Online, The Australian

Warren Lee, Group Director – Content Strategy & Integration, APN

Jan Razeb, CEO, Hungry Mobile (Czech Republic)

Abigail Thomas, Head of Strategic Development, ABC

Content partner for the event is Future Exploration Network, which is currently preparing a website and report on iPad and media. We are still developing the strategy frameworks, but I thought it would be worth sharing some of the high-level strategic issues we think are important, and will be raised at the iPad workshop (to the extent we can in the time available!).

iPad in the distribution mix. As some have pointed out, iPad can not be looked at in isolation. It is one of an increasing number of channels for content distribution and revenue generation. Strategies need to examine not only relative characteristics of the available channels, but how they complement each other and afford economies of scale or reach. In particular, the iPad is just the vanguard of a coming cornucopia of tablets and other media-friendly mobile devices.

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Thoughts on the future of workplace communication

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Earlier today I spoke on a live webcast on the Future of Workplace Communication as part of Viocorp’s Future Forum series.

I took notes during the panel session and posted these live on my blog right after the event. I took notes while the other panellists were speaking: Nicky Wakefield, head of human capital at Deloitte, Philip Cronin, general manager of Intel Australia, and Oscar Trimboli, head of the information workers group at Microsoft.

I wasn’t able to take notes while I was speaking myself, so having had a look at the panel discussion which is now archived and can be viewed at the Viocorp site (requires registration), I’ve written out some of what I said during the discussion.

10:50 – 14:00

Workplace is not a good term to refer to the future – people will be working from anywhere so workplaces will have less impact than they have today. In the bigger context we also have to question whether organizations as we know them today will exist. Transaction costs are going down, meaning that moving forward, organizations will have to justify why they exist. There will be many business models bringing together loosely coupled talent and processes.

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Getting perspective: Hand-held business computers are over 20 years old

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Last week I interviewed my old friend Tom Stewart, formerly editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, and currently Chief Marketing and Knowledge Officer of Booz and Co, for a piece in CPA Australia’s magazine InTheBlack. I’ll share the article, on the role of financial executives in business strategy, on this blog later in the year.

Tom mentioned the fact that Frito-Lay, the most profitable division of Pepsico, introduced hand-held computers for real-time inventory management back in 1989. I had a look and found a fascinating article from 1990 in the New York Times titled Frito-Lay’s Speedy Data Network, focusing on the information the system provided. It says:

Frito-Lay’s electronic network has already led to a sweeping change in the company’s competitive strategy. As the network developed, the company realized it could now shift from a national marketing strategy to one that emphasized local responses, so-called micro-marketing.

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No more checking in: why public facial recognition may take off

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minority-report-ads.jpgWe all know that processing power has for many years increased exponentially and continues to do so. This essentially means that any processing-intensive task you can imagine will eventually be possible.

Facial recognition happens to be a task that humans are hard-wired to be exceptionally good at. While computers struggled at this for a long time, it is now an entirely viable technology in controlled conditions, as when people are walking through turnstiles or gates.

The facial recognition used at the 2001 Super Bowl was successful enough to apparently nab 19 people with pending arrest warrants, while facial recognition is now commonly used in border security.

It becomes a lot harder when people’s faces are not viewed from the front, however to a large degree that’s where the increased processing power comes in handy.

Mark Cuban says that he has just invested in a company that uses video to identify how many people are in a given area, which can be useful for safety, security, and traffic control.

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Extending the scope of augmented reality to what you CAN’T see

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To many people, augmented reality is about annotating what you can see. Names of landmarks, reviews of restaurants, the sale price of houses, and so on.

However with a little imagination, augmented reality can allow us to see what is around us but invisible, or what our environment will be like at another time.

As a follow up to the award-winning augmented reality iPhone app SunSeeker, which shows the direction of sunlight at any time on any time, Graham Dawson has released See Breeze, an “Augmented Reality Wind Visualizer” which shows the direction of the wind. Graham has a detailed write-up of See Breeze on his blog. The video demo below gives a feel for what it can do.

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