An Appocalyptic Tableaux: A Tale of Too Many Tablets
115 million tablets will be sold by 2014 according to the infographic below. 66.5% growth year over year.
Fascinating to think that while just about everyone (and their child) has a cell phone these days, that we’ll all soon have “x” tablets by household.
As the steady stream of upgrade/next-generation iPads arrive, year after year, expect each family to have two then three tablets lying around the house. Think of them as “media coasters.”
We’ll go from 65 apps per device to 650 apps without sweating the micro-transactions.
A peek into the Orwellian iPad-diction of society: The hand-me-down 4G generation will quickly see kids getting the short end of the digital stick; instead of a laptop, they’ll get the tablet and learn to type book reports on touch screens.
The adults will also go tablet for home use, putting much less time on their work laptops, eventually leaving them at the office. Office IT budgets will skyrocket down.
With all email and personal media (music/movies/photos) in the cloud, bluetooth keyboards and mice will fold up into the tablets for the workhorses (voiceover INPUT will be de rigueur), while most will dialog via 140-count (and briefer) communiqués.
Shorter but more frequent individual output will be swallowed by longer and more frequent input, aka consumption. Twitter will be eclipsed by a shorter version of itself; bit.ly will become a real-time and timed-out, unique symbol.
Eventually, we’ll “share” more via links we “like” than actually sharing original ideas. Curation will become less about the “best content channels,” and more about the “opinion channels.” Colbert copycats and O’Reilly orifices.
Newspaper of the Future, Ex-Googler Style
Calling itself “The World’s First Personalized Newspaper,” Hawthorne Labs has released Apollo on iPad only ($2.99 and going to $4.99). Founded by Google ex-coders for the most part, Apollo offers a cleaner, more laid-out version of NetVibes, Google News, AllTop, Newser, Yahoo!, HuffPo/Drudge – basically any of the news aggregators but with related clustering and more social modularity.
We’re looking forward to testing out, but check out the well-designed layouts below and the YouTube video (after the jump with its bumpy classical/techno, engineer-produced beat). These kind of news tech builds are somewhat generic in structure – an Apple, Facebook, Google, NYT or Demand Media should be able to duplicate, as it’s UI/UX with a good web crawler/recommendation engine.
However, what we still find missing, is who is aggregating the feeds? What is the POV that makes it interesting. If the recommendation engines and content clusters are dead-on for high-level, online readers then the results will be good…for that reader, but what about others with less disciplined RSS/news browsing. Who are the leaders or tastemakers of online content consumption that, frankly, are worth following.
Who is the voice of the NYT – we know the voice of Dealbook? Who is the voice of the LAT – we know the voice of Company Town?
Google Checkmate on Apple and iPad Hype: Buy Adobe
With the new Apple iPad receiving an iHype or iYawn from the tech and media communities, a former colleague and Applephile, Patrick Kearney, suggested that Apple was crazy not to just acquire Adobe and own/integrate Flash. I counterpointed via the socialnet, that Adobe would be more integral to Google’s apps and offer a serious checkmate on Steve Jobs’ ability to close out his Apple hardware and software ecosystem.
The Google Value in Owning Adobe:
- Keeps Google intrinsic to Apple, especially if Bing replaces Google Search across Safari, iPhone, iPad browsers and devices.
- Adobe owns Omniture, an online marketing, data mining and analytics company, which it picked up in September 2009. Like Google’s acquisition of Urchin which became an invite-only Google Analytics and is now free for anyone. Omniture could be the premium or pro solution for big brands that need the stepabove solution, and of course crave CRM. It’s more behavioral, offers paid SEO across all search platforms, so it fits accretively.
- Launch Google lite version of Photoshop and Dreamweaver (and…?) for its Google Apps. Many people are moving over to Gimp, an open source Photoshop design app, from outdated versions of Adobe’s Photoshop. This would democratize the products, while still offering premium versions that require a monthly subscription to remove the contextual ads and continue to innovate the product features for power-users before they go mainstream and free. Think of it as R&D for the premium, paying crowd who want the full version, and then as features become common, they go to the open, Google app public. This model of lite versus full versions is working well for the Apple Apps Store, and could move to an online subscription model to avoid distribution fulfillment and other retail packaging costs.
- Ownership of Flash enhances YouTube’s dominance in online video. Pretty clear, Google labs up Flash internally and figures out ways to make it pay out more for its slowly monetizing video flagship. YouTube’s choice advertisers get premium Flash benefits; innovations trickle down to other top UGC performers.
- Google Phones benefit from mobile improvements to Flash. The Android and Nexus One become more marketable, and Google licenses Flash to the Blackberries and other mobile players.
- And, of course, the obvious: every media-savvy site uses Flash and it rolls up 75% of online video, plus marketers like flashy display banners, so Google owns more of the food chain – from media co’s to video players to brands and their agencies looking to stand out in a very noisy internet environment.