(Compare: The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We’re All Going To Miss Almost Everything – NPR ).

This is the fundamental equation you have to understand about the information economy, and Attention being its only scarce resource: While supply of content of all types is going to infinity, the total amount of available Attention remains essentially static. Thus, the price for content must by necessity trend toward ZERO.

As for Curation, here is the money quote from Kevin: “Instead you will pay Amazon, or Netflix, or Spotify, or Google for their suggestions of what you should pay attention to next. Amazon won’t be selling books (which are marginally free); they will be selling their recommendations of what to read.”

We are beginning to see many examples of this already, e.g. here: “Not #free, but close: Amazon is selling digital downloads of Lady Gaga’s newest album for 99 cents -> j.mp/jRhhZz “.

Also, there are plenty of enterprising young artists that are bypassing the old structures entirely, and are going straight to FREE + Social Media Marketing + Monetizing the value-added back-end in the ways that are the only ones predicted to work with FREE (See: Gerd Leonhard on The Future Of Selling). E.g. here: “Stanford-educated rapper embraces fan piracy – Video – CNN Money -> bit.ly/k2B3Iv“

And Apple has been busily buying up deals with most of the major music labels, to presumably offer an Apple-branded “cloud-based” music streaming service very soon [this was unveiled as iTunes Match in the fall of 2011]. If they are smart, they will price it within what I call Impulse Purchase Territory, ideally somewhere between $1-5/month.

I’ve said previously that e.g. Sony is making a huge mistake by not going the $1/month route for complete/unlimited streaming music access with their own new offering:

Because “that would put it in the complete impulse purchase, don’t-need-to-think, will-likely-never-cancel-for-any-reason category. What if they could thereby garner 100 Million users, thus spending about $1.2 Billion, or in other words about 20% of what still is left of the global music industry?!”

If Apple doesn’t do it, then someone else eventually will. Only then will some in the #Dinomedia come to see, that the race was not about who was still going to eek out some residual “crumbs” profits from the Old System, but who was going to wholesale import the masses into their Ecosystem…

Instead of dumb ideas like the New York Times Pay Wall…I mean Fence, that only prove the deep denial that many from the Old Guard still find themselves in, because… well… the good old days, they were so very nice…

While they lasted. Looking at all of these examples I can’t help but be reminded of one of my favorite quotes by SciFi author William Gibson: “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet.”

Better wake up quick, because, as Seth Godin says, “Whining isn’t a scalable solution.”

The Satisfaction Paradox

…What if you lived in a world where every great movie, book, song that was ever produced was at your fingertips as if “for free”, and your filters and friends had weeded out the junk, the trash, and anything that would remotely bore you. The only choices would be the absolute cream of the cream, the things your best friend would recommend. What would you watch or read or listen to next?

In theory, you would not choose since it does not matter. Leave it to serendipity, since every option is wonderful. If your filtering/recommendation system really is working, then anything you accept from them should be satisfying.

This is the psychological problem of dealing with abundance rather than scarcity. It is not quite the same problem of abundance articulated by the Paradox of Choice, the theory that we find too many choices paralyzing.

…what outfits like Amazon will be selling in the future. For the price of a subscription you will subscribe to Amazon and have access to all the books in the world at a set price. (An individual book you want to read will be as if it was free, because it won’t cost you extra.) The same will be true of movies (Netflix), or music (iTunes or Spotify or Rhapsody.) You won’t be purchasing individual works.

Instead you will pay Amazon, or Netflix, or Spotify, or Google for their suggestions of what you should pay attention to next. Amazon won’t be selling books (which are marginally free); they will be selling their recommendations of what to read.

You’ll pay the subscription fee in order to get access to their recommendations to the “free” works, which are also available elsewhere. Their recommendations (assuming continual improvements by more collaboration and sharing of highlights, etc.) will be worth more than the individual books. You won’t buy movies; you’ll buy cheap access and pay for personalized recommendations.”

In the last 7 months most of my blogging and curating has happened on Google+ (find me here and add me to your Circles), but for various reasons that I will explain later (one of them is that the affordances for longer, more serious posts with multiple images or screencaps are still very poor there), I’ve come to the conclusion that I want to revive this blog.

As a first step, I am going to republish (and update) a number of key posts from both my Amplify and Google+ streams, those with the most evergreen value to refer back to in future posts, of which I have quite a few in the pipeline.

Here are the topics I have been writing most frequently about, designated by #hashtag for easy recognition on all services (Blog, Google+, Twitter, asf.):

#Dinomedia – issues around Old Media still trying to resist the digital age, and is still confused about the problem of

#Freeconomics – how to still charge for something when everything digital is trending toward $0.

#Content – the overall problem of Content Overabundance and the Content Creator’s Dilemma, and how they relate to #Blogging and #Curation.

#MobileWars and #TabletWars – Apple’s iOS against… well, mostly it’s just Android now, even though as I predicted, the going is much tougher for Android on tablets than on smartphones.

#PatentWars – especially in Mobile, but in general in technology and software. In the past I have also filed many items under #PatentlyAbsurd, and sometimes under #CopyWrong, where we are dealing more with the issues of Copyright in the Age of Freeconomics and Moving The #Freeline.

#GeoWars have been a subsection of Mobile topics, and while they aren’t burning as brightly as they did in 2010/2011, we’ll keep our eyes on the developments there. Basically, Foursquare has been pulling away in the space, in part due to its keen understanding of #Gamification.

Last but not least, I always collect and write about #Mindhacks (especially Business Mindhacks such as #Pricing and #Branding psychology that has reared its head in a big way for the would-be iPad competitors), #Lifehacks, and Productivity / Getting Things Done ( #GTD ).

I will very likely include a new/updated detailed “pillar post” for each of these. The Business Mindhacks blog is also going to get a visual redesign in short order, including an overhaul for better rendering/readability on Mobile devices.

By the way, today 31 / 366 = 8.5% of your year have already expired. Time to get busy. Tick tock…

Best wishes – Alex Schleber

Why? Because Gamification has not only been one of the trend words of 2010/11 in tech, but also one of the very real trends in the actual designs of user experiences/user interfaces (UX/UI).

Here are some key excerpts from a great recent post, The Gamification of Life, the Universe and Everything by Allan Patrick:

As the first “Gamification” workshop in London was held today, I thought it might be interesting to look at this rather fascinating Fortune article about Seth Priebatsch who:

…sensed something three years ago that most of the rest of us did not: that a generation raised on video games would want to keep playing a game in real life. “I found out that basically the real world was essentially the same game as Civilization [an old computer game], just with slightly better graphics… and slightly slower.”

[...] ”I have a much broader definition of game than most other people,” he says, explaining that games are just systems of challenges, rewards, and biases.

So it turns out that a lot of this straight-up Behaviorist thinking is very important in the development of technology, more important than most people realized before the advent of Facebook, Twitter, and Foursquare, and more important than most of us would like to admit to ourselves. Because… well… we like tho think of ourselves as more evolved than simple stimulus/response “machines”.

But the fact is that whenever a game or game-like structure is presented to people, people as human beings will tend to play them. This fact is of course much older than Social Media, or than the above-mentioned computer games, though Seth may be right that the acceptance of game mechanics in all manner of contexts could have only gone up, not down, from these societal developments.

In fact, The Wall Street Journal wrote recently that “some analysts claim 50% of businesses will be gamified by 2015″!

One recent example of what I call an “indirect game mechanic” is the Twitter “follower count game”, which a lot of people were “playing” rather vigorously ca. 2009-2010. The fact that this count metric is presented front-and-center on the services main user pages, keeping score like a pinball machine, enticed users to jump through all sorts of hoops in their quest to gain more followers.

But even the micro-blogging activity itself on Twitter could be described as having game-like aspects, because 1) the activity is short and regulated (the 140 character limit on Twitter had more implications than people realized).

And 2), there are instant feedback loops such as the tweet count (“score”) going up, your tweet becoming an instantly visible “result” in your and other people’s update stream, and further intermittent/irregular-schedule feedback by other people responding to your tweets, or passing them on as Retweets.

Twitter’s @ mentions tab is the Behaviorist’s irregular reward-schedule mechanism of sorts, because we are literally pre-programmed to check for our reciprocal attention “reward” often. Behaviorists such as Skinner and Pavlov figured out long ago that such an “irregular reward schedule” was the most reinforcing of all.

So it comes as no surprise that the micro-blogging activity has become so self-reinforcing (in other words: addictive) for a lot of people, that they do things subsumed under it that they heretofore shunned. For example, doing a form of short-burst knowledge management (KM) inside of corporate organizations or more loosely-based interest groups.

Twitter clones like Yammer and SalesForce.com’s Chatter have sprung up since 2009 that propose to piggy-back on these effects, and are creating real changes to internal information flow and exchange: It turns out that with all previous iterations of corporate KM attempts, people were simply not incentivized in a way that “made them” actually do the desired activity…

Here’s a key quote I curated in 2009:

[W]hoever acquires Twitter will in essence take possession of an army of… tens of millions… of humans who are actively, accurately, and enthusiastically meta-tagging pages. In the arena of human-augmented search, Mahalo is a useful wheelbarrow, while Twitter is a fleet of 747 cargo planes.

The key word here is “enthusiastically”… why? Why is anyone enthusiastic? In large part due to the underlying gamification “rewards” as described above!

It is very important to understand all of this if you want to think yourself into the “games” of current and future social media. As Allan Patrick states:

The trend will be to build in more gamification by adding in more games for people to play:

- There are no badges and mayorships in SCVNGR [Priebatsch's own gamified geo-location-based service similar to Foursquare]. There are points, and you get these points by not just checking-in, but also by doing various crowd-generated “challenges” while you’re at the place you’re at. [...]

- He started a pilot program in Boston and Philadelphia that gives users better and better deals as people continue to come back to a restaurant. “Pure [geo] checking-in isn’t going mainstream,” he says, and is working on a Groupon-Gamification called Level-Up [...]

There is no doubt that the “white hat” attraction of Gamification is to get people more hooked on your online businesses rather than the competitor’s, and also [...] the “black hat” attraction of getting your hands on more of people’s personal data, the New New Gold.

I would have to agree. Some of it will be explicit, in the form of games that are identified as such. But much of it will be more implicit, or “invisible game mechanics” not consciously perceived as real games, but of game-like character.

And either way these will get you and hundreds of millions of other people online to do certain activities, billions of times a month. Still think you can afford to not understand Gamification?

GigaOM was quick to point out 5 Problems With Gartner’s Tablet Forecast, among them:

Apple’s iPad is poised to continue its overwhelming lead in tablet sales until 2015, holding 47.1 percent of the market according to research firm Gartner. Google’s Android tablets will slowly catch up to nab 38.6 percent of sales by then, while media slates built upon platforms such as MeeGo, QNX and webOS will barely be a blip on the radar, accounting for just a combined 14 percent of tablet sales four years from now. On the surface, these predictions may sound logical, but upon closer inspection, there’s more wrong than right here.

1) 2015 is at least two (or more) product cycles away. [...] While the iPad may not see monumental design changes each year, Apple is sure to evolve the device several times in the next four years. The same holds true for other tablet makers using different platforms. Simply put: It’s too early to predict what the tablet market will look like several device iterations from now due to powerful new processors on the way, faster mobile broadband in wider coverage areas and improvements in mobile software and apps.

While I agree that the Gartner study is making way too many assumptions overall, some of the rosier projections for Android (including Gartner’s own forecast of near 40% share by 2015) are probably having the same issue:

1) The only thing that we know with relative certainty is that Apple has put up a huge lead, and has become the uncontested category leader. If past experience is any guide (study your Ries & Trout on Positioning), that should put it on track to retain 50% share at a minimum, but quite possibly more (60-70%).

2) Especially since Apple went all out on pricing the entry-level $499 iPad so competitively, that the first few would-be competitors couldn’t even begin to catch up with Apple in that regard. Only now are e.g. Samsung rolling out an Android 2.2 tablet in a Wi-Fi model for $349 (April 10), which is priced below the $499 “price anchor” Wifi iPad/iPad 2.

But this is hardly a direct price beat, given that we are talking about a 7″ screen size tablet, not running the latest Android 3.0 “Honeycomb” OS optimized for tablet use (and it may not ever get the upgrade to it), and not fully up to snuff to the iPad’s build quality. So that consumers may well view this price in line with expectations for the different form factors.

3) That’s how strong Apple’s lessons learned from their iPod mass-market device manufacturing have been. Which brings up the legitimate question of whether the tablet market will turn out more like the MP3 player market than the smartphone one:

It all hinges on the question of how much Apple bungled things by staying with AT&T exclusivity for too long. What if there had been a Verizon iPhone (and Sprint and T-mobile as well) by the X-mas shopping season 2008? Would Android have even stood a chance? Would it have surpassed iPhone share as it did by now?

Since the carrier lock-in factor is almost a non-issue for tablets (the trend has been toward the Wifi-only versions anyway), Android has no such help in tablets.

4) Another thing missing: The ingenious “Droid” counter-branding to the iPhone’s own deep Archetype Branding that lifted the sale of all Android smartphones, whether intended or not, doesn’t appear to be crossing over into the Android tablet market.

Motorola created a brand with the Droid that was smartly capturing the few remaining archetypes that Apple had not employed:  Mainly “The Outlaw” (unrepentant, dangerous, bad) and “The Titan” (greatest strength, number, expanse) archetypes inherent in the allusion to the Terminator robotic eye, and to robots in general.

Symbols of “bad boy, take-no-prisoners machine”, combining within itself “the greatest strength”. To quote the original ads: “In a world that doesn’t, Droid does…”.

It appears that Motorola, Samsung, Acer, et al. are starting nearly from scratch in this regard in terms of the tablet market (which may be their biggest mistake yet, because they could have easily pushed the Droid branding into the tablet realm as well, it’s not too far of a brand extension), and so far I have not seen a break-out branding concept from any of them.

5) Much has already been written about the retail display advantage that the iPad currently has vs. the Xoom and other would-be competitors, another area that is quite different from the mobile carrier retail situation with smartphones:

Of course they are the only tablets on display at the Apple Stores, but they also visually dominate at non-exclusive retail outlets such as Best Buy, where the iPads sit on display with the rest of Apple’s shiny “tech-marvel” products, while the Xoom sits somewhere off to the side crammed in with a variety of netbooks and other cheaper fare…

All in all, those are a lot of advantages for the iPad. And any would-be competitors clearly have their work cut out for them if they are hoping to get even close to the 40% share predicted by Gartner for Android. Not to speak of the smaller challengers like HP’s TouchPad with its own WebOS (from the acquisition of Palm), or Blackberry/RIM’s Playbook, who’s only hope appears to be to make a play through entrenched enterprise computing relationships.

For more on my early predictions on iPad’s category leadership due to competitors missing the boat on getting their offerings out quickly enough, see: Is the iPad a fine young cannibal?

Is Blogging dying, or at least on the decline?

The article has sparked a good bit of debate, prompting e.g. GigaOM to retort: “Blogging Is Dead Just Like the Web Is Dead .”

But rather than latch on to the specifics of some percentage gains or losses, that may well be semantically arguable as pointed out in the Times piece, I believe the key quote to be this:

Former bloggers said they were too busy to write lengthy posts and were uninspired by a lack of readers. Others said they had no interest in creating a blog because social networking did a good enough job keeping them in touch with friends and family.

Which is both an argument for the type of Curation-plus-commentary-plus-community activity I’ve been advocating for on my current “mini-blogging” platform of choice, Amplify.com, as well as apt to highlight what I have come to call “the Content Creator’s Plight” or Dilemma (I’ve been cooking up a longer, substantive post on this for a few months, but ironically always find myself dragged in other directions…):

It is difficult enough to keep up with our 21st century information “maelstrom” to begin with. And to arrest the flow of the real-time Web long enough in one’s mind to write much of substance on rapidly emergent, “newsy” topics, so that a post might persist in providing value for longer than a day or two. The other day I curated a post that aptly coined the term “content decay” in this regard.

In a way, it represents a massive act of will, especially in the face of what is now a fair number of professional “blogging machines” (like Techcrunch), that do nothing else.

Now add to that the fact that without already having sufficiently large, built-in audience, which very few bloggers ultimately achieve, the motivation for these “acts of will” is very quickly used up… Notice the second sentence in the above quote, which points out that many find such a built-in audience, and hence at least perceived affirmation, on their social networks of choice.

A service like Amplify, and intelligent curation tools in general, can solve at least the first issue, and while many of its curation peers are neglecting the community/conversation angle, this is where Amplify ultimately shines in solving the second problem to some extent as well.

Going back to the original question, one could say that blogging is most definitely evolving, though also certainly still alive and well:

[B]logging is not so much dying as shifting with the times. Entrepreneurs have taken some of the features popularized by blogging and weaved them into other kinds of services.

Ultimately, people are still expressing themselves online, in however long or short a form (though the trend has certainly gone toward the Twitter- or SMS-like micro-blogging), and the main differences are merely the User Interface (UI) metaphors used.

For example, Amplify has been wrestling with the issues of providing easy-to-use, elegant metaphors, while still maintaining a modicum of depth and relevance for conversation. Bigger services such as Tumblr (another mini-blogging tool) or Twitter have grown so rapidly precisely due to the extreme, push-button simplicity with which content could be created or curated, and passed along socially.

As I’ve argued before, Simplicity Wins, but there is also a fine line to walk to provide both simplicity, as well as still allow for the depth that at least some of us crave.

So how did they get here: By understanding something about human psychology, and then HACKING it for all its worth.

1) Addict people with SIMPLE, low learning-curve games, that 2) are social in the way you might have played certain board games in real life in the past, and that 3) have Irregular Reward Schedules (these are the most addicting forms of behavioral reinforcers, read up on your Behaviorism 101…).

THEN, 4) offer them little ways to essentially cheat in the games (making things go more smoothlyfor you), that 5) can be purchased for amounts that fall within the Impulse Purchase threshold, i.e. below the price level where your conscious mind kicks in fully and begins to wonder whether this is really a good idea, asf.

Read the following quote at least 3 times to yourself: “Zynga makes all its money selling virtual goods…Tiny amounts of money make the games progress faster.” (From Business Insider.) If you get it, you’ll know that tons of companies have been neglecting/violating the lessons therein to their considerable detriment.

I just argued yesterday that Sony is making a huge mistake by not going the $1/month route for complete/unlimited streaming music access with their new offering:

Another example that I saw just yesterday: Clever Twitter service “Buffer” ( @bufferapp ), which allows you to in essence do a bit.ly-like bookmarklet share to Twitter WITH automatic posting throttling/buffering built-in, so that your tweets are dripped out over time even though you can batch collect them all at once over, say, your morning blog reading hour:

All great, except that they are mispricing their premium levels very badly: 10 tweets in buffer, 3 tweets a day is Free. $5/month for 50 tweets in buffer, 10 tweets/day dripped, and $30/month (crazy…!?) for all unlimited is simply not going to work for them IMO. [See: http://www.bufferapp.com/pricing ]

$5/month is outside of impulse purchase range, while $1/month = Bingo! Sold! At $5, your mind is beginning to ask: Do I really need this? Is it worth it? Can I justify it directly via increased ROI? Where/how am I even going to measure this ROI?

All questions that you DON’T WANT your prospective customer asking at the entry point!! Which is exactly what Zynga has realized so brilliantly, and to such obvious success. The proof of the (psych) pudding is still in the eating… Zynga: “Would you like to improve your position in this game you are already playing for 10 cents?” – Unconscious Mind: “You bet I would.”

Which brings me to another of my pet points about successful online advertising/selling: Offer people only things which make sense in the context of what they were ALREADY doing. In this case, don’t try to offer them after shave, bracelets, or cars while they are playing Farmville, offer them something to do with Farmville!

Disclosure: I don’t play Farmville or CityVille, and have never tossed sheep or vampires at my Facebook friends. I do however study these phenomena very closely… :)

CHART OF THE DAY: The Death Of The Music Industry

This stunning chart needs to be put in some context to understand the true nature of the upheaval facing what I like to call the “Dinomedia”:

1) Forget About Buying Music Online – People Don’t Even Want To STEAL Music!

2) FREE can actually work, with a little creativity: “How Girl Talk mashes up the Music Biz”.

3) Sony’s new “idea” to launch a me-too Music subscription service priced the way they are proposing is 1) Doomed, and 2) fails to take the reality of the above chart into account:

“Sony believes its huge userbase and retail presence can help its subscription music service succeed where countless similar services have failed.
…
The Basic tier of service — which will cost $3.99 per month in the U.S. — gives users a set of curated music channels with the ability to fast-forward and rate songs. That’s very similar to what users can get for free from Pandora and countless other Internet radio stations, as well as the free music channels on digital cable TV systems.

The Premium tier — $9.99 per month in the U.S. — is the same price as countless other subscription services (Rhapsody, MOG, Rdio, Microsoft’s Zune Pass, and so on) but doesn’t have any mobile story [yet].”

Their retail presence?! Really? That is exactly the portion of the music business that is dying completely. I thought Denial was usually one of the earlier stages of the “5 Stages of Grief” model…

Why can’t they understand that they have next to NO PRICING POWER left? (Again: Many cannot be bothered to STEAL their product anymore…).

That they are much better off gaining whatever Attention Pie/eyeballs/earballs they can for their music ecosystem (and make further back-end sales there later on, similar to what ONE LONE, yet innovative DJ is able to do)?

For example, what if Sony were to do something bold, and price the “Premium” subscription at $1/month, no contract. That would put it in the complete impulse purchase, don’t-need-to-think, will-likely-never-cancel-for-any-reason category.

What if they could thereby garner 100 Million users, who would be spending about $1.2 Billion, in other words…about 20% of what still is left of the global music industry?!

At that price, could they get 200 Million users? One would hope so. Given that Apple is expecting to sell 40M+ iPad tablet computers costing $499 and up this year alone…

Wake up, #Dinomedia, before it is forever too late…

Why? Because the iPad, barely 6 months old, has already sold around 7-8 Million units, and is on track to break through 10M units for the year. That makes it the fastest electronic gadget sales ramp-up in history!

Still think that Apple’s deep Archetype Branding to create aspirational products is meaningless? Keep in mind that this record is being set as the wider economy is still largely suffering the after-effects of The Great Recession, and is at best in a tepid recovery.

And as Business Insider reports,

Apple is gearing up to sell 45 million (!) of them next year, says Ticonderoga Securities analyst Brian White who just chatted with supply-chain vendors in China and Taiwan (via Elizabeth Woyke at Forbes).

Sales are rising so quickly that according to BestBuy and other retail outlets, the iPad is beginning to truly “cannibalize” netbook and even laptop sales (by as much as 50%!). I had predicted the former in my Deeper iPad Intel post, but the sheer speed of the impact is surprising even to me.

How did this happen so quickly? First off, it turns out that the majority of people really didn’t need/want major creation powers with their computing devices, making the issue of “no physical keyboard”, etc. a moot point.

Sure, Bloggers and other writers are still going to need more powerful text input, image/video artists/designers/editors more finely grained image manipulation via a mouse, asf. But this “creative class” is only a fraction of everybody, and even they might enjoy some simple social media, video, reading, etc. consumption every so often.

And keep in mind that people are now able to edit photos/videos on their i- or Android Phones. Not super sophisticated, but I’ve seen some pretty impressive photo alteration results in recent months.

And people love the direct touch interaction, very long battery life (when compared to most laptops), and quiet/cool running with “rapid-ON” startup of the device.

Also as I predicted in that same post, Amazon appears to have successfully positioned the Kindle as the cheaper, and more task specific eReader. There even is a TV commercial out with a lady tanning/reading poolside, that makes fun of iPad’s outdoor glare problem. Smart positioning move by Bezos & Co.

And of course there are signs that the iPad will be sold at Amazon, Target & Walmart just in time for the Holiday shopping season. Somewhat related, Amazon is also coming out with its own App Store for Android smart phone apps. What it means is this: All mobile/tablets, all the time, everywhere…

Which brings me to another prediction of mine and a very important point about category leadership. As I said in the Deeper iPad Intel post, the longer that potential iPad competitors wait to get their products (hopefully actually competitive ones) out the door, the more Apple gains a head start that makes it the de facto owner of the entire category.

By default! Because the competition was asleep at the switch…as Nokia, RIM (Blackberry maker), et al. already were with the iPhone.

We are reaching an important threshold in the next few weeks. Whatever tablet competitors come out in time for the holidays (like Samsung’s Galaxy Tab, which is launching at all four major wireless carriers according to their own launch schedules, but which may end up being priced too high, possibly $399 WITH contract), will have a chance at competing with iPad.

Especially on price, as is being proven by Kindle. But the window is clearly closing, so it must be disconcerting to Microsoft that there are still no particularly good/credible Windows 7 based tablets on the market. Part of the problem is that Windows 7 isn’t really optimized for touch-based computing, even though it sort of works right now.

But the much bigger issue will be the build quality and power/CPU needs of the devices that try to run with Windows 7. A current entrant into the field shows the main problem: The CPU needs a fan and creates heat/noise, same as in a laptop, while having less battery life for more weight.

So it may be well into 2011 until Microsoft is geared up to compete on par, by which time Apple could control HALF the tablet market for the long haul (as predicted by Category Leadership).

Writes PC Magazine(!) in “Windows Tablets Can’t Match the iPad’s Magic“:

“The iPad has No Competition…Sure the Samsung Galaxy Tab looks cool. Dell has Streak in the wings. God knows, at some point HP will release the Slate that it has been teasing for the last six months. And Microsoft will almost certainly…well, I am sure they will do something… Nonetheless, right now, there isn’t a single tablet that can go head-to-head with the iPad. The product has been on the market for six months and no rival… By the time The BlackBerry PlayBook comes out next year, Apple will be releasing the iPad 2.”

BTW, that 2nd generation of iPads could easily include the 7″ screen form factor I’ve been clamoring for.

Will Apple be running away with it? And if so, how much will it ultimately cannibalize Windows, and how fast? Certainly Wall Street has been in the mood to punish Microsoft’s stock of late.

Opines Goldman Sachs, heretofore forever bullish on the company who’s IPO it once underwrote:

…investor sentiment on Microsoft’s core Windows and Office franchises is unlikely to improve until the company gains a firmer foothold in the growing migration to mobile devices – both smartphones and tablets. We don’t see this happening this year as Apple’s iPad and iPhone plus Google’s Android operating system are well established; a Windows-based mobile device could certainly begin to garner momentum in 2011, but the stock remains in show-me mode until at least then…

The bet seems to be that iPad and possibly Android-based iPad clones will be “fine young cannibals”…

(Read my original post on why 100 Day countdowns are meaningful and actually work here.)

As you may have noticed, I’ve taken an extended hiatus from blogging this summer, and am just now finishing up a 6 week project that took a little longer than expected.

But I am back, and determined to finish out the last 100 days of 2010 STRONG, which includes posting regularly again.

BTW, I have remained somewhat active on Amplify.com curating the Business Mindhacks relevant goings on from across the Web and the Tech world. You can catch up here:

alexschleber.amplify.com

I had already been bringing key excerpts along with quick comments and footnotes through Posterous to my Twitter followers, which proved useful and popular. Amplify has been taking it up a notch in terms of intelligent Curation, as well as a great community with much engagement all around.

OK, back to the 100 Day Countdown and finishing the year out strong:

Decide right now what you want to accomplish until then in your business and/or personal life, and you’ll be doing yourself a much bigger favor than if you were waiting around to making those typically flimsy, rapidly forgotten New Year’s resolutions on December 31.

As SelfGrowth.com editor David Riklan once wrote in a newsletter email:

What if I were to follow you with a camera crew for the next 100 days while you went for your goals? I bet 3 things would happen…

1) You would START doing the things you say you need to do.
2) You would STOP doing the things you know you shouldn’t be doing.
3) You would MAKE monumental performance gains and change your life.

Here’s to your finishing strong!

Best wishes

- Alex Schleber

When clicked, it takes you to the same Twitter Search (internal) view for that keyword phrase as any other Trending Topic would, only now the top tweet is the “Sponsored Tweet”, which presumably also comes up if you were to type in the search yourself.

So far, so good, as this set-up folds in the ad as unobtrusively as possible into the user experience, a feat that Mashable’s Pete Cashmore called ingenious in a CNN.com post he wrote about the new system.

I’d point out that while it may be necessary to do things this way, there is likely a reduction in response, i.e. the click-through on the actual ad, which represents the second click already. As a rule of thumb, assume 50% drop in response for any additional step in your Web efforts).

And Twitter will likely play things close to the vest as far as additional click results from the Retweets that can happen around the Sponsored Tweet, so we won’t know whether that alone can make the considerable cost of the promoted trends/sponsored tweets worthwhile.

But the real problem is this. Look at what can show up right below the promoted tweet, based on Twitter’s own Retweet-count-based popularity surfacing:

Probably NOT the brand experience that Pixar was aiming for. The tweet by movie critic Roger Ebert might only cost some 3D revenue, but the 4th tweet is slightly reminiscent of the PR disaster (around larbor/fair trade) for Nestle on Facebook some weeks back.

As you can see, that tweet may very well have gone nearly as viral as the promoted one! Definitely food for thought as brands shift more and more advertising online and into social media.

One bonus oddity I recorded from Twitter yesterday: Due to the instability of the platform during the massive World Cup server and internal data center network loads, Twitter has shut down the Profile Cards, and Geo-Location pop-up functionality to lighten that load. As well as intermittently, the Trending Topics…so that only the “promoted trend” was left in the sidebar:

Harmless for now, but user annoyance might grow if this were to continue. Either way, we can say that Twitter’s Status Blog has been busy again…

Mind boggling, isn’t it?

So the question is, how can your message, product, or service break through the noise?

I found this great Social Media counter widget in Jim Long’s (AKA @NewMediaJim on Twitter) thoughtful post The End of Innocence – Why Social Media Is the New Corporate Media, where he writes:

As social media has matured, I get the sense that [...] now we’re back to where we once were. Brands just want access to us and the transaction remains the same.  Look, I understand that companies need to make money and that investors need to get returns [...]. But I’m struck by the rapacious speed with which social media, its adherents, and platforms are pursuing the buck. Ironic to me, considering that it was dissatisfaction with traditional media and “push” advertising that in many respects gave rise to social media.

So, what are your thoughts? Is Social Media already dying as a marketing strategy due to relentless overcrowding, in essence a form of the “Tragedy of the Commons” principle?

Are hyper-localization or micro-niches the only possible answer to this onslaught?

One of the few things that appears to still work reliably on a grander scale is deep Archetype Branding, of the kind that Apple, successful Hollywood movies, and even some New Media personalities (like Gary Vaynerchuck, Unmarketing, or iJustine) have in common.

Any other ideas?

And while everyone has predictably been falling all over themselves to get in a lot of general reporting about the debut, yours truly has been busy curating the less obvious, in order to get to the bottom of the question – to buy or not to buy…

The Form Factor Issue

After testing out the iPad at the Apple Store in Austin for about 20 minutes, and then again the following Monday at BestBuy for nearly 2 hours, I have to concur with the commentators that said it was a bit on the heavy side.

Not so much in the sense of the weight itself, but in the sense of being distributed in slightly too large of a form factor (kind of like overly large furniture making moving of it more awkward even if the item isn’t that heavy).

Not once did I think that that there wasn’t enough shown on the 9.7″ screen. Instead, it was almost too much. And watching various commentators such as Scoble et al. on the review by The Gillmor Gang wield theirs for the camera, they looked a bit too large as well. Wield is the right word for it come to think of it.

I said in January after the announcement that I had wished for the iPad to be “one size smaller”, about paperback size. Slightly smaller screen, less bezel instead, to keep it at about 4 x times iPhone size, rather than 6 x. If it had to be slightly thicker to fit batteries and other entrails, then so be it. No one seems quite as obsessed with (device) thinness as Steve Jobs come to think of it.

We’ll see if one of the other tablets planned for Android/Chrome OS or Windows will take advantage of this smaller form factor. [UPDATE: Looks like Dell is going to, with 5" and 7" screen versions of its Streak tablet. 5" seems a bit too small given that the current largest smartphones are already nearing 4.5 inch screens.]

Think about it like this: A 10″ screen held at 2 feet equates to a 50″ screen at 10 feet! (This is why no one thinks that hard about the little screens in the airplane seat backs being too small to watch many hours of movies on long flights.)

Right now I have my laptop on my lap, with the 15″ screen about 2 feet away. The iPad would have to be held with your arms fully out-stretched to create the same distance. At about 1/2 – 2/3 of that distance, the current iPad screen size will actually be the same (at 2/3) or even bigger than that (at 1/2 distance). I really think a 7-8″ diagonal screen would be completely sufficient.

And make the tablets much easier to wield…

The keyboard issue

There are several aspects to this:

1) There seems to be confirmation of what I suspected in my previous iPad post, that the keyboard dock is not as usable as it may first appear. The reason being that the whole thing is a bit unstable for switching from typing to touch-screen as Engagdet writes: “Our one complaint? It’s not that easy to interact with the touchscreen from this angle” (note that NO Bluetooth mouse is supported), and doesn’t transport well.

[While speaking of docks, an interesting fact that seems to be slipping through the cracks is that the VGA-out dock or adapter enables to output content that is DIFFERENT FROM what you see on your iPad screen for at least some applications that make use of this, e.g. Apple's Keynote presentation app.]

2) Given this reality, it is better to buy the Apple Bluetooth keyboard, IF you need a physical keyboard at times. It will work for other Bluetooth enabled computing devices in your house, etc.

Engadget in the same post shows a good quick video showing (at bottom of post) how fast it it to synch up the Bluetooth keyboard.

The question really is, is it needed at all?

The reports on on-screen virtual keyboard usability vary from good (some claim 50-words per minute, and a pre-launch reviewer from PC Mag wrote his entire detailed, multi-page review on it) to so-so, with the landscape view typing mode appearing to…ahem…win by a landslide.

But even in landscape mode, touch-typists who are used to resting their fingers on a keyboard have a problem, because the virtual keyboard will intermittently think you have begun typing.

The portrait view mode however seems to please next to no-one as far as typing more than a few keystrokes is concerned.

Why? Too far apart for thumb-typing or one-handed “hunt & peck”, too narrow for good two-handed typing. Bummer, if there weren’t an excellent solution that I hinted at in the comments on my last post:

3) Swype. One-handed gesture-based input by “swyping” the letters of a word. The application was unveiled at TechCrunch 50 last year, and is finding its way in private (?) beta onto some Android smart phones.

Why is it not on the iPad? That’s the $64k Question. Swype would appear to be a no-brainer, something that could have really pushed the iPad over the top beyond all doubt.

Fast input, aligned with the ergonomics of the device, seamless transition from touch-based navigation to touch-based Swype “typing”, workable and fast even for those of us who happen to be slowish 2-Finger typists.

This alone may make me wait for an Android tablet with Swype on board, with a slightly smaller screen as discussed above. Yeah, it’s that important.

.

Other stuff that is actually great

Somewhat under-reported has been the fact that the battery life is truly excellent, anywhere from 8 hours (non-stop, full-blast use with only the most resource-heavy applications), up to 12 hours or more with normal usage. Very few of the reviewers appeared to be able to get below Apple’s claimed 10 hours, which is a remarkable feat. Manufacturer battery life claims used to be notoriously…how do I put this…optimistic..

Also under-reported is another near miracle that instantly should make the iPad a couch computing favorite: It emits next to no heat, and has no fan, hence no fan noise. All while keeping the screen applications and video very snappy.

This may well prove huge, for business meetings as well, where Steve Rubel has already seen a more positive acceptance than either a laptop (creates distance) or a cell phone (makes people think you’re texting/checking your email).

Despite a variety of conspiracy theories for why Apple has it in for Adobe, THAT is the real reason why Flash is not being supported. Flash is a CPU resource hog. It’s why even a pretty powerful dual-core laptop starts to spin-up mightily when viewing most flash-based video. Have the thing on your lap, and the hot “exhaust” from your CPU is warming up your pants for you.

This is a HUGE DEAL. A literally cool and quiet computer. And just as I write that, here comes news that apparently iPad has issues with sitting out/being used in the hot sun, and can shut down pre-emptively to avoid overheating. Makes sense since it’s all glass and aluminum…

Also underreported: By way of a variety of apps such as Citrix Receiver, the iPad can run any remote computer and nearly any of that computer’s applications that might be too complex or large to run on iPad natively. This could be one of the killer apps for the iPad in settings such as hospitals. Steve Rubel’s point about meetings comes to mind again: Where a laptop would be inappropriate by a patient’s bedside, a tablet can be natural form factor.

About the iPad’s Kindle-Killing…

Much attention has been paid to the iPad’s impact on publishing, especially as a new entrant in the eBook reader category vs. Amazon’s Kindle device. So this area warrants some close scrutiny.

First, let’s point out that Apple is playing it pretty safe when it comes to anything that could smack of anti-trust worthy stiff-arming: The iBooks app is NOT installed by default, even though the iTunes Store is making a pretty obvious suggestion to install it. And Apple did not attempt to block the Kindle app, so they’ve learned from the iPhone Goggle Voice app brouhaha.

Apple has a lot of clout and likes to control everything, and yet, it doesn’t want to get into it with Congress if that can be avoided.

So how should Amazon play this?

Don’t try to take a shrill stand in a battle that can’t be won. Instead of carrying on about how the Kindle is still the superior eReader (e.g. in bright sunlight, which is probably true), Amazon should

1) drop the price for the Kindle immediately to below $200,

2) applaud the iPad for running the Kindle app so well, and so beautifully, pointing out that the Kindle really is a for-the-beach/pool type device, and

3) highlight the fact that ALL of your existing Kindle books will play on the iPad AND hopefully still on your Kindle as well.

The last point will make the Kindle a great hand-me-down device for kids who you don’t quite trust with a $500-900 iPad. And likely persuade prior Kindle owners to stick with the Kindle bookstore. Which is what Amazon should care the most about. There never was much use for them to get into a hardware race against Apple.

The Kindle will eventually simply be seen as a transitional device while Apple and others were still figuring out the new form factor. And meanwhile, Amazon has learned tons of valuable things about eBook economics. The business it should be in.

Given the various issues described further up, especially about the outdoor overheating, maybe it is too early to count the Kindle out just yet, and maybe it will fare better for longer than I first thought. Especially if Amazon further lowers the price.

More details on the iBooks app

One of the big issues that appear to be surfacing in regards to the iBook app is the bookmarking. Writes Gizmodo in “Hands On: Apple iBooks”:

Apple’s Bookmarking solution is perfect for highlighting a favorite line, but pretty lousy for just keeping your page. And, yeah, for a casual reader, this is a biggie.

And I would add to that that iBooks bookmarks are missing the capability to add your own commentary, a must for those of us who are used to heavily marking up our non-fiction books.

Here is another weakness Kindle could exploit for the time being, as relayed by PC World in “iPad as E-Reader: Glaring Problems, Promising Apps”:

By and large, in my reading, iBooks offered the slickest e-book navigation experience I’ve had on any device. Regrettably, however, iBooks makes a poor choice for anyone who wants to read e-book purchases on more than one device. Unless you plan to take the iPad with you everywhere, you’ll be without an e-reader much of the time. To make its bookstore more compelling, Apple needs to make desktop and phone versions of its reader. Until that happens, I won’t be buying any more books from Apple.

That’s pretty definitive, and may be a great life-line for the Kindle.

In summary, has the game just been changed?

I think we can safely assume that the ecosystem of iPad apps, accessories, and other add-ons will be a healthy one, see this example of people’s ad-hoc ingenuity… as the iPad as a design/art object is already spurring on a lot of further, often artistic ideas.

However during my tests one thing I realized is that there clearly is a learning curve for non-iPhone users as far as the basics of the interface are concerned. While that should help to rustle up Apple’s existing customers, it may prove to be a hurdle for very broad adoption. Then again, some commentators have already pointed out that very young users between say 3 and 13, are taking to the iPad like fish to water.

But plenty of adults are also ecstatic. Writes Michael Arrington in his “Unauthorized TechCrunch iPad Review”:

…the iPad beats even my most optimistic expectations. This is a new category of device. But it also will replace laptops for many people. It does basic computer stuff, like email and web surfing, very well. Applications load quickly and are very responsive – think iPhone 3GS with a 50% speed boost.

That’s what surprised me the most. The iPad isn’t just for couch computing…It’s a perfectly usable business device. And the form factor just happens to work far better for cramped places like airplanes than a normal laptop. I doubt I’ll ever open a laptop on a plane again after tomorrow…

The iPad will put significant pressure on laptop sales, particularly second device laptops.

Of course, here is the guy that was so desperate for the tablet form factor that last year he had his own tech blog delve into the device manufacturing business for a bit, and created his own Linux-based tablet prototype, dubbed “The CrunchPad”. (That project ended rather abruptly due to his overseas partners running away with the device under rather dubious circumstances.)

So, do we have a winner?

Someone on Gillmor Gang (see link above) intoned: “April 3 2010, the day the laptop died – or at least became the walking dead.”

I would concur that sub-12-13″ laptops and netbooks have just been dealt a considerable blow.

And Windows 7 based tablet PCs are just not really very far beyond a basic Windows PC with some touch features enabled, it’s as of yet not an end-to-end offering. Microsoft appears to indirectly be acknowledging this by basically ditching Windows Mobile 6.5, and going back to the drawing board:

The (still) unfortunately named (and just “renamed”) Windows 7 Series Phone is pointing in the right direction, but Microsoft won’t have it ready until the fall/X-mas, which means a tablet offering based on it is unlikely to be forthcoming until some time next year at the earliest.

That leaves many as of yet un-announced Android/Chrome OS based tablets, we will have to see if any of those materialize before the X-mas shopping season. Either way, that leaves a lot of room for Apple to run away with the entire category.

If everyone who can afford one and wants this class of device is buying an iPad now, then category leadership kicks in, and could well keep Apple in cruise-control and above 50% market-share from here. Until an entirely new category of device makes the iPad obsolete. Maybe it will be something like this Sixth Sense Technology TED Talk, for example.

Despite my overall positive views of the iPad and relative excitement about the tablet form factor, I for one decided to hold off for a bit longer due to the detail issues described above, which as you can tell are quite different from the ubiquitous and nearly reflexive complaints of “no multitasking, no Adobe Flash, no camera”.

None of those weighed very heavily for me. We will see if maybe Dell’s Streak in a 7″ version running Android and allowing the use of Swype for text input will end up being everything I ever wanted in a tablet. That such an Android device very likely would also support multitasking, Flash, and a camera (the “Big 3 Complaints” about the iPad) would only fall under the rubric “bonus” for me.

Please add your own iPad usage experiences and research in the comments below. Did you get one? Will you? How about an Android based tablet?