Wednesday, January 27, 2010

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The iPad Comes With iBooks And Will Cost $500 To $700 Top
Steve Jobs revealed the Apple iPad today, its much-awaited tablet computer (see our live notes). Jobs positions it as a third computing device between a laptop and a smartphone geared towards the “key tasks” of Web browsing, email, sharing photos, watching videos, playing games, and reading digital books. All current iPhone apps will run on the device, as well as new games and digital books designed specifically for it. An enhanced iPhone SDK released today will support both the iPhone and the iPad. Some specs: The device has a 9.7 inch display, weighs 1.5 pounds, and is half-an-inch thick. It is powered by new chip made by Apple itself, a 1 GHz A4 and will come with 16Gb to 64 GB of storage. It supports WiFi, has an accelerometer, compass, and built-in speaker and microphone, just like the iPhone. The screen is a full capacitive multi-touch screen. Battery life is supposed to be 10 hours. And it will cost $499. On-stage, Apple highlighted the iPad’s use as a digital reader. The iPad comes with a new app called iBooks
 
Apple Announces The iBook Store Top
Apple's hoping to recreate the magic of what iTunes did for music with the addition of a vast selection of electronic books. Announced at Apple's event today , the iBook store. Book pricing has been set similarly to what's offered on Amazon.com's Kindle platform -- the first book will be $14.99, a Ted Kennedy book (available on Kindle for $14.78). It works just like the App Store with a simple tap to purchase the book.
 
New iPhone SDK With iPad Support Coming Today Top
Another year, another iPhone OS upgrade to get excited about. They're not saying much about it just yet, but Apple has just announced that the new iPhone SDK (complete with support for the just announced iPad tablet) will be available today. As partially predicted by the rumor mill, iPhone applications will run on the iPad. We're not talking hit-or-miss compatibility here; according to Steve, compatibility up at 100%.
 
Looks Like The Apple iPad Doesn't Have Flash, After All Top
We’re in the middle of Apple’s special event , where Steve Jobs is showing off the much-anticipated iPad for the first time (yes, that name is now official). And judging by one photo captured during the presentation, it looks like the device won’t support Flash. As Jobs showed off the iPad’s browsing capabilities, Engadget captured a photo of the tell-tale blue missing plugin icon that shows up when you try viewing a Flash element without the plugin installed. Whether or not the Tablet would support has been a topic of extensive debate . The iPhone has never supported Flash, and Apple has never done anything to indicate that it would be coming out any time in the near future (in fact, their strategy appears to involve moving away from the ubiquitous plugin).  With that in mind, the iPad’s lack of Flash support comes as no surprise. But the device features browsing as a key element, and there are going to be plenty of people trying to access their casual Flash games and Flash-based video sites, only to be met with that frustrating icon. It’s still possible that the Tablet could support a limited version of Flash that simply didn’t support that piece of content on the New York Times website, but I wouldn’t get my hopes up. We’ll update this post if Jobs says anything more about Flash support during the presentation.
 
Apple Unveils The iPad – At Last – And It's $499 Top
All the naysayers can feel free to eat their hats. Today Apple finally revealed the device we've all been whispering about for a good year or more. The Sasquatch of gadgets is real. We'll update this with all the details as they happen; in the meantime, follow our live coverage . Looks like a big iPhone to us.
 
Live From The Apple Tablet Event Top
We’re here in San Francisco for Apple’s event today where they’re expected to unveil their new tablet computer which may or may not be known as the iPad, iSlate, iBook, iTablet, the Apple Tablet or some other variation. The event starts at 10 AM PT. Below find our live blog:     CrunchBase Information Apple Tablet Apple Information provided by CrunchBase
 
Games People Play Together: Apple Bingo, Apple Drinking Game Top
Ah, Bingo and high technology. They go together like peanut butter and motor oil, except for the few times each year that Apple announces something. In that spirit, please enjoy a little "Tablet Bingo" while you follow the coverage of Apple's mood-altering gadgets. And while you're playing Tablet Bingo, consider the following questions: do you like Apple announcements? Do you like to drink? Do you like to drink while following Apple announcements? Whether you answered yes or no to any of those questions, here's an Apple announcement-specific drinking game. Play along with real booze or your favorite non-alcoholic beverage. Enjoy.
 
Localeze To Power Local Business Listings For Bing Top
Local business search startup Localeze just announced that they will power some of Microsoft Bing’s local business listings. Microsoft will use Localeze's 14 million listings for Bing Local and Bing 411. As part of the deal, Bing will use Localeze's premium business content, including more than 500,000 business-verified and managed listings, which have been edited directly by local businesses. In addition to name/address and contact info, Localeze’s listings also include hours of operation, products and services offered, credit cards accepted and more. All of this information will appear on Bing's local business profiles. Any local search results on Bing utilizing Localeze content will be attributed to Localeze. Bing seems to be building up its local listings to compete with Google’s vast database of local listings. Localeze promises keyword rich, verified and current local business content to local online search directories, vertical local search engines, social networking search sites, mobile search applications and Internet Yellow Pages. The company competes with InfoUSA and Acxiom. The local listing space is getting hot. Earlier today, AT&T announced the launch of its own local listings site, Buzz .
 
Looking For Stock Photos? Compare Prices With The SpiderPic Search Engine Top
Ginipic has partnered with Picitup to launch SpiderPic . That’s a lot of pics, and it will undoubtedly be not much of a surprise if I tell you the product has something to do with pictures. Stock photography, to be more specifpic specific. SpiderPic is essentially a meta-search tool for stock photos that aggregates relevant shots from a host of third-party providers and lists results in one crisp interface, pricing from all (eight) suppliers included. As pointed out on the Examples page, these price differences can be quite huge even for identical imagery, so if you find yourself regularly buying stock photos, this is a service you might consider bookmarking right now. When you do a search for say, tablet , SpiderPic returns as much information as possible about each photo, and refer potential buyers to the source for actual purchases of photos or to get more detailed information such as promotions, special offers, and specific license restrictions. The only thing that bugs me is that the prices or price range aren’t actually displayed when you get the list of search results, which means you have to click through every time. Ginipic / Spiderpic co-founder Lior Weinstein tells me: The technical challenge behind SpiderPic’s comparison feature, was to create a system that you can use only an image, with no text as a reference, and search in real-time between millions of images and return results within split seconds. We decided to partner with Picitup to supply the image recognition technology since they are by far the best out there – they serve top tier players such as eBay and Shopping.com. SpiderPic also offers browser extensions to enable people to search and compare prices quickly from whatever browser they’re using (though the Google Chrome extension is still in the works). SpiderPic plans on rolling out a similar image search feature soon, which will enable buyers to take any image they found on the web and find out whether the same or a similar image one is available for purchase for commercial purposes on the various agencies they support (Fotolia, iStockPhoto, BigStockPhoto, etc.). With the tool, the startup intends to make it possible for buyers to use any service on the web for searching images, without the need to worry about copyright infringement. Weinstein admitted to me that the agencies are not all happy about the service, understandably. He says he has even received e-mails from some demanding that he remove their search results from SpiderPic. He doesn’t seem all too worried about it, though, and says that the same thing happened when the first regular online retail comparison shopping engines started popping up several years ago. You can read up on Ginipic, which is a desktop application for searching images across photo sharing services, in my earlier review of the product.
 
The Tablet Could Spur A Media Revolution, But It Will Be Out Of Apple's Hands Top
Here we are, on the eve of the Tablet’s unveiling, with only hours to go before we find out just how ambitious Apple’s latest creation is. Countless articles have been written about how the forthcoming Tablet could be the savior of old media. Supposedly, people will finally start paying for this content because it will be readily available at their fingertips. But the promise of the tablet does not lie in immediate access to content; the Internet can already do that, as can the Kindle, to some extent. The true revolution lies in the new medium the tablet will give us. Four months ago Dan Lyons, writing as Fake Steve Jobs, totally nailed it : New technology spawns new ways to tell stories. That's the really exciting thing here. Not the tablet itself, but what it means for news, for entertainment, for literature. Gasp. Geddit? Is the f***ing light going off yet? This is what Anton Chekhov meant when he said that the medium is the message. This is why the Tablet is so profound. There is no point in moving to digital readers if we're just going to do what we did on paper. That's why Kindle is such a piece of shit. All they did was pave the cowpath. And that's why we've held back on our Tablet — not because the technology wasn't ready, but because the content guys are such f***tards that they still can't create anything that makes it worth putting the Tablet into the world. You Say You Want A Revolution Now, I don’t think the Kindle is a “piece of shit” by any means. The Kindle is to text what the iPod was to music. It lets you store and easily carry a vast amount of content with you at all times. That’s in no way a bad thing — the iPod has been adopted by a significant portion of Earth’s population because its appeal is so universal. But the Tablet can break new ground. It won’t just be a new way to conveniently access content. It will be a new way to consume it. Last September, Gizmodo reported that Apple was urging publishers to create so-called hybridized content that “draws from audio, video and interactive graphics in books, magazines and newspapers, where paper layouts would be static. ” When we hear talk of Steve Jobs saying this is the most important thing he’s done, I don’t think he’s excited about giving people a bigger screen to watch their movies on, or to play better games. I think he’s excited about changing the way we read and learn. But it’s going to be tough. My concern is not that Apple will fail to deliver; I have little doubt that their product launch tomorrow will be stellar. My doubts lie with the content providers themselves. Yesterday, the LA Times ran a story that touched on this : Although Apple has proved its deftness at creating trendy devices and a digital store in which publishers could sell their wares, Gartner Inc. analyst Allen Weiner said there will be plenty of trial and error before newspaper, magazine and book publishers figure out the “fine art” of creating digital editions that take advantage of the device’s graphics and video”… “Where’s the opportunity? It’s creating book experiences. It’s taking a cookbook and adding video and author updates. That’s an opportunity, because you can charge extra for that.” The question, then, is how long it will take publishers to figure this out for themselves.  Perhaps I’m a pessimist, but I think that this will be a long and frustrating process. Look at how long it has taken the large media companies to fully embrace rich, multimedia content on the web. Old Media Is Still In Trouble The online buying model for newspapers and magazines isn’t going to save the publishers, any more than iTunes Music and TV downloads have been saviors for their respective content owners. Will consumers benefit? Absolutely. But they won’t be willing to pay a premium for content they can access on the web for free. And if old media shifts to a pay-only model, consumers will just switch to free online alternatives. There will be exceptions — publishers with high quality, exclusive content (say, the New York Times) will likely benefit. But the majority of newspapers and magazines? Not so much. But what about this promised land of revolutionary hybridized content — won’t people be willing to pay for that? Thing is, that’s going to be time consuming and expensive to make. A handful of very large publishers, like the NYT, may be able to scrap together some compelling content on a regular basis. But it’s going to be difficult to quickly integrate additional supplementary material in a way that doesn’t feel tacked on. So Who Will Benefit? Textbooks. Guides. Biographies. Novels. Pretty much anything that has previously been offered in book form, but has been handicapped because it was restricted to paper. Few of these have ever been ported to the web in a rich media form, because they’re lengthy and it just isn’t fun to read a book on your computer screen. And even when textbooks have been digitized (like for the Kindle DX), they didn’t bring anything new to the table. But there’s so much room for improvement. Imagine a biography of Abraham Lincoln that allowed you to pull up photos of every person and place mentioned with a single finger swipe.  Flicking the top of the screen would bring down an interactive timeline of Lincoln’s life, making it easy to get your bearings. The hybrid book could include comprehensive references for each person mentioned in the book. Not just a Wikipedia article, mind you, but information that is contextually relevant to the moment you’re currently reading about. The experience wouldn’t simply be one of jumping from hyperlink to hyperlink. All of this supplementary material would naturally flow into the reading experience, while you never left your place in the primary text. There are plenty of other potential applications. Picture a chemistry textbook where you could freely rotate any molecule, tapping on a chemical bond to learn more about why it behaves the way it does. Or a Shakespeare play (in text form) where you could tap a piece of dialog to hear it spoken aloud, or perhaps even played in a video. Tapping a sidebar at any time would bring up a roster of characters and their allegiances, lest a love triangle leave you confused. There are infinitely more possibilities ready to be unlocked.  Many of these things could be done were this content converted to a rich webpage, but up until now there hasn’t been much benefit to doing so because there was no way to comfortably consume it. My guess is that come Wednesday, Steve Jobs will hold up a Tablet with a piece of content that lives up to this dream. Instant lookup of relevant information. An experience that simply has never been seen before. It won’t just be a webpage with a touchscreen — it will be a living book. It will be the future. And then we’ll have to wait years until we start seeing books that really live up to that promise. Apple can build the tools, but someone will need to deliver the content. I’m still excited for the Tablet, I’m just not expecting it to live up to its potential for quite a while. The big publishers will figure out this new medium eventually. Well, maybe they won’t. But someone will. Fake tablet image via Gizmodo   CrunchBase Information Apple Tablet Apple Information provided by CrunchBase
 
AllVoices Raises $3 Million For Citizen Journalism Site; Takes CNN's iReport Head-On Top
With the events that took place in Iran last year, the Mumbai bombings and even the plane crash on the Hudson River, there’s no doubt of the power of citizen journalism in today’s media age. Whether it be through social media sites, such as Twitter or through news sites catered towards citizen journalism, the active voice of the eyewitness is now a significant part of any story taking place in the world. Citizen journalism platform AllVoices is seeing significant use traction and is giving its rivals ( many of which are similar sites started by traditional media companies, such as CNN’s iReport ) a run for their money. AllVoices also recently closed a $3 million round of funding from VantagePoint Partners, bringing the startup’s total funding to $9 million. AllVoices allows anyone to contribute blog posts, images, videos and other observations, on local and global news. The site’s proprietary technology (AllVoices has filed for three patents) will tag, rank and sort news based on a global, regional, country and city pages and will determine what is breaking news and popular (in terms of phases of a news cycle). The system will also filter for spam, police the site, fact check each user report for credibility and assign a credibility rating to each news report. The site also lets users file reports from their cell phone via MMS and SMS, which is helpful to users in countries where computer usage is low but mobile device usage is high. The end goal is to provide a 360 degree view of reported news that also has a multimedia view of what’s happening in the world. The brainchild of Amra Tareen, AllVoices was launched by Tareen and her co-founders in 2008. A former VC at Sevin Rosen Funds, Tareen recognized the importance of the citizen voice in everyday news in 2005 when she was an aid worker in Pakistan following the catastrophic earthquakes that caused massive damage and deaths in the country. Tareen may be onto to something with AllVoices. The site currently has a community of 275,000 citizen reporters and is seeing close to 5 million unique visitors per month, which is fast growth for a recently launched media startup. Half of AllVoices’ traffic and visitors are from outside the U.S. and U.K, with citizens reporting from over 160 different countries. Tareen emphasizes that the site is as much a community as a news platform. Contributors can collaborate on stories and discuss news with other users and readers on the site. While AllVoices may be seeing steady growth, the citizen journalism platform may be close to overtaking CNN’s iReport, which seems to be the site’s main rival in terms of traffic. Tareen says that as of late 2008, iReport had 118,000 registered users and is “fully confident that AllVoices is the largest citizen reporting cite in the world” (see update below). Another competitor in the space, NowPublic was acquired by the Examiner.com last year for $25 million. So what’s next for the site? Tareen says that she wants to focus on expanding the hyper-local coverage on the news site in the U.S. I can;t help but think that AllVoices may be a possible acquisition target for a media company that doesn’t have a popular citizen journalism portal. One things for sure; we’ll be hearing more from AllVoices in the future. UPDATE: CNN has reached out to TechCrunch with updated numbers on iReport: * CNN iReport has more than 477,000 registered "iReporters" (Source: iReport Server Log Data) * According to Nielsen Online, CNN iReport is the number one citizen journalism site online (Nielsen Online Custom, September '09) * The iReport section of CNN.com averages 2.1 million unique users each month alone. (Source: Nielsen Online) * iReport experienced its highest traffic day on June 11, 2008 with 2.8 million page views (Source: Omniture) * iReport averages 16,112 submissions (photo and video) each month. (Source: iReport server log data)
 

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