Regardless of what you think of the iPad and its successor number two, the new magnetic smart cover looks awesome. I’ve seen iPad owners carry around all kinds of small and large covers, cases and bags and similarly they think of all kinds of ways to make the iPad stand up to type on it and watch a video. I don’t like to carry around a cover or case for my smartphone and would probably not carry around anything for an iPad. What’s the point of having a beautiful device if you’re going to wrap it in some cheap plastic? This smart cover solves this problem beautifully:
If you’re curious about my other thoughts on the iPad 2, then I refer you to this video with Charlie Brooker:
Jive software, one of the social software vendors, has done a survey under its customers about the benefits of using social software.The survey has been executed by an unnamed independent research company. Some details have been given about the survey but not many. Since the results are being published by the vendor and the fact that they’re quite positive overall makes you want to know more about this research, but as is often the case you only receive the results.
I have displayed the results below. The survey was both about internal use of social business tools among colleagues as external social software towards the customer.
Internal
39% increase in employee connectedness. 25% decrease in onboarding time. 29% increase in executive communication. 34% decrease in time to find information and experts. 27% reduction in email sent. 26% decrease in time needed for meetings. 27% decrease in duplicated tasks. 32% increase in ideas generated within the company. 23% increase in win rate. 32% decrease in time to find answers. 37% increase in project collaboration and productivity. 30% increase in employee satisfaction. 24% decrease in need for travel.
External
42% increase in communication with customers. 28% decrease in support calls. 33% increase in customer satisfaction.
31% increase in customer retention. 34% increase in feedback and ideas from customers. 34% increase in brand awareness. 27% increase in new customer sales. 27% increase in existing customer sales 34% increase in web site traffic from existing customers. 32% increase in web site traffic from new customers. 26% increase in web site sales. 31% increase in brand advocates. 33% increase in clicks from Google searches. 27% increase in channel sales effectiveness. 26% decrease in channel support costs.
These variables are also not really properly defined (employee connectedness?), but the main idea of the survey was to ask employees of companies who have bought and used Jive software how they thought these variables have changed. This of course makes the results a perception of these respondents and therefore subjective. This is not necessarily a bad thing but important to keep in mind.
Dion Hinchcliffe has also criticized this survey because of this, but also argued that if you view multiple of these surveys there are trends visible.
The ones he sees popping up in multiple surveys and researches are:
Workers can find the information and people they need faster with social tools.
Communication overhead in legacy platforms shrinks when social tools are deployed.
There is a correlation between increased marketshare and socially networked organizations (McKinsey Research).
So for now the status of Enterprise 2.0 remains unchanged. Because IT purchases are frequently involved a cost-benefit analysis needs to be made before investing in social software. It is however still difficult to provide clear-cut claims on ROI, although much anecdotal and case study evidence can be provided that social software is an investment that pays off. In this evidence a positive trend can be seen.
Twitter is rolling out its new version of the web interface. Some people will never notice, because they are using mobile or desktop apps, but it’s still interesting because it says something about how Twitter see its product. Still mostly for flinging short messages into the webosphere and less for conversation, apparently. Twitter CEO Evan Williams also mentioned in the announcement that currently 78% of Twitter users are using the web interface.
Twitter unfortunately still is terrible for conversations. This might not be such a big problem for most users who just post their lunch and do nothing else, but sometimes you’d like to have a more profound discussion with someone about you peanut butter and jelly sandwich or grilled cheese. See below for such a conversation. It’s too bad it took me almost 10 minutes of investigative journalism and paint ninja skills because out of the new Twitter interface it’s absolutely unclear this conversation ever took place.
The following image is the information Twitter gives about the last tweet in this discussion.As you can see, not so helpful. Below finally is an example from Friendfeed of how an conversation could be displayed. This makes it a lot easier for anyone to chime in.
When you read a lot of things online, you run into some inconveniences pretty soon. First of all reading from a screen just isn’t ideal. I’m not sure what it is, the angle, the light or something else, but it’s more tiring and slower than reading from paper. I also do quite some reading on my smartphone, especially in mobile Google Reader and find it more comfortable to be able to change the viewing angle of the screen (looking down instead of horizontal).
Unfortunately I haven’t been able to try out many e-readers yet to see if they are more convenient. I can really imagine that a true e-reader, with e-ink and without backlight can be easier to read. I did hold an iPad last week and thought it was nice, but you’re still looking into a light and it’s also quite heavy for reading for longer periods of time while holding it with one hand.
Still there’s much to read online. Many of us read a lot online, blogs, articles, forums or informational and news sites. With all the flashing advertising and strange design choices of some websites (light grey text on a white background, really?) it doesn’t get easier to read online. Now Readability is a plug-in from Arc90 in the form of a bookmarklet for Firefox and Safari or an extension for Google Chrome. It takes the text from a webpage (and does a good job of locating just the main text) and displays that on screen without any other disturbances. To install go to this page. You can choose the font, size and whether you want black on white or white on black text. Then drag the bookmarklet button to your bookmarks or your bookmarks bar. Then click on the button anytime you are reading something, such as this webpage.
It greatly increases the readability of any webpage or blog, it also works with an online RSS reader such as Google Reader. I’ve also used ad-blockers. They also improve your reading experience by removing distractions, but not as much as Readability because it leaves the text how it is. And it’s debatable whether it’s morally justified to remove ads, while they pay for the writer and creator of the page. With Readability you first see the regular page with ads and then create a better to read page to do some real reading. Let me know if you have tried it and what other solutions you know for better reading online (short of printing the internet).
To install on Firefox or Safari go here, or to install the extension Readability Redux (which does the same) in Google Chrome go here.
For software you could say: it’s not important how good it is it, it’s important how fast it is updated. These are all called the iterations of improving software and show how much effort a developer is putting into it’s product. WordPress has it both. The product is already very good, full featured and polished, but it’s also getting better fast. They have just released version 3.0. No wonder it’s the most used blogging and website content management system around. And all that open source and for the cost of zero. I believe they have a very smart business model by providing the software for free to download (and install on your own server, as I have done) or using their server and signing up at WordPress.com. When you use their server the basic model is free but if you want more speed or customization you have to pay extra, and that’s how they make their money.
Exactly because Worpdress is now so full featured and polished, the development team is going to take a development cycle of three months off. Not to sit at the beach and look at their final product, but to improve all the things around the platform, such as the showcase, Codex, forums, profiles, update and compatibility APIs, theme directory, plugin directory, mailing lists, core plugins, wordcamp.org… Sounds like a smart move to me.
I’ve just updated to 3.0 which all went smoothly and am looking at the backside of Thelonious right now (all their updates are named after jazz legends). It looks very similar, but just a little cleaner and fresher. Other improvements are the updated default theme and the incorporation of WordPress MU (Multi User) into the regular version, which lets you administrate multiple sites. For more information on the new version check out their video below.
I enjoy reading news online. I also subscribe to a newspaper (the Dutch NRC Next), but get most of my breaking news and background information and opinions online. I have been reading the item “Media Diet” on The Atlantic Wire with a lot of interest. The idea is to ask journalists about their media diet, or how they get their news and other things they read. Obviously it’s hard to compare yourself to the interviewees since they are all professional journalists, who are supposed to keep up with all the latest for their work and can spend a whole reading site, newspapers and magazines and still call it a productive day. So don’t be overwhelmed if you read many of these people receive three to five newspapers and finish them before breakfast, only to continue their news reading online. I’ve found an especially good read if you’re looking for some interesting blogs that are a little less well known.
As I said, it’s hard to compare yourself (myself) with some of these guys, but I still can tell you how I get my news and what I read otherwise. I get a newspaper, but most of the time I save it for when I travel or have some time to kill out of the house. For my main source of online news I use an RSS reader with a twist called Feedly. It uses Google Reader as input for news, so you have to load some feeds into that, but than it makes a newspaper/magazine style front page. On this page the stories are displayed which are most read and shared by other people, so you get the most interesting stories on top. After that you can always zoom in on some specific news sources.
This works best if you have many different news sources in there, as long as you don’t oblige yourself to keep up with them all (you don’t need to, you get the best of the best on the front page). I have added the feeds collection of Zee of The Next Web at one time to my reader. It’s a file (OPML) which you can import into Google Reader which will add all the feeds to it. There are many interesting blogs and news sites in there although it is very tech centered. A bundle with 13 of my favorite feeds can be found and imported into a feed reader here. Some more favorites in the Dutch language can be found here.
Besides these feeds I like to read things on Digg, I have to keep myself from visiting too often, so I go there once a week and read some of the top stories. After this I enjoy browsing the site of The New York Times, especially Opinions (Krugman and Friedman first) but I also like the Technology posts by David Pogue. New Scientist is great for popular science and Physorg features some more detailed scientific news, it’s quoted/linked to a lot by other news sources. For economic article the Harvard Business Review is one good source.
Obviously there are many more interesting news sources. One way of finding them is by using your Twitter friends. You can watch their stream for good links, but Twittertim.es gives an overview of the most interesting things for you, quite similar to Feedly. I’ve written about Twittertim.es before.
Allright, I’d love to hear what blogs you don’t miss a post of. Or have you started a real media diet for yourself and are you trying to cut back on reading online? Let me know on twitter or right here in the comments.
I’ve been walking around with two devices for a while now. Not all the time but often I would have my Nokia N95 8GB with me, together with an iPod Touch. But now I have an HTC Desire.
I’d use the Nokia for phone calls, but also some mobile web browsing such as Google Reader or a mobile web Twitter client. I’ve never installed many applications on it. It almost seemed Nokia didn’t want you to install anything on it, that’s how hard they made it. And the launch of their Ovi app store only made it a little better. I still really like the company Nokia, they are the complete opposite of Apple with their openness and anti-hype way of communicating (which may be part of their Scandinavian nature but perhaps also a little damaging to their PR). In the end I was not a big fan of their products anymore. Even the N97 which looked like Nokia’s answer to the iPhone failed to deliver with a certain confusing difficulty to it’s menus and unfortunate trade offs such as the resistive screen.
I carried around the iPod Touch for consuming news via newspaper apps or watching video podcasts. It’s obviously very user friendly, but sometimes a little frustrating in what Steve Jobs doesn’t allow you to do (and that’s how it feels when you can’t do things like multitasking or installing another media player). I just read Apple did allow the Opera browser to the app store, but just the fact that everyone was holding their breath for that and the arbitrariness because other browser have been disallowed says it all.
Now the Android operating system which is inside my new phone (think of it as the Windows or Mac OS inside the phone, while it’s actually based on Linux) is like a marriage of the Nokia and the iPod Touch. It’s versatile, but user friendly. There are more things to figure out than with an iPhone which makes it more customizable, but also less easy to use. When you give it to someone less computer savvy (I call this the girlfriend test) she will pick up and figure out the iPhone a lot faster than the Android phone.
HTC Desire keyboard installed on a Nexus One
The hardware of the HTC Desire is practically the best there is with a fast processor and amazing screen. Only the camera could be a little better (I’ve never been blown away by a camera phone, although the camera in the Nokia was very good) and the internal memory could have been more especially since that is the only place to store apps. Music, photos and videos can be placed on a memory card. I also think the on screen keyboard is the best I’ve used. I’m typing this on it right now.
One major difference between the iPhone and Android phones is the app store of course. Apple has a huge advantage with their ever increasing collection of apps. Usually this causes so called network effects (the more apps there are, the more interesting the product becomes, the more users it will get, the more apps there will be developed, etc) which at a certain moment are very hard to duplicate or substitute for a competitor. The fact that the same app store can be used on many different Android models is a very smart way to overcome this problem, I think. This causes the user base to grow, which stimulates aforementioned cycle. Already almost 80% of iPhone developers have stated they are planning an Android app.
So I’m very optimistic about the Android platform and can’t wait to see what to future hold for these two rivals, because I think it’s clear these will become the two dominant players.
Perhaps you know and use Feedly, a sort of alternative interface for Google reader, which displays your feeds in a cool way that looks a little like a newspaper. But to use Feedly you have a Gogle Reader account and fill it with interesting feeds. Feedly does a good job in showing you the most interesting things from those feeds, but it still costs quite some time and effort to shape your collection of news sources. Of course this also adds to the customizability and that’s why I use Feedly almost every day. If you like reading news online I suggest you check it out.
If you already have a twitter account with a group of friends you have hand picked, then you probably also enjoy reading the links they’ve sent. Now Twittertim.es works really easily in managing and displaying the links from your friends. It’s a really cool way to see what is hot with your twitter friends right now. The only thing you have to do is log in with your twitter account and Twittertim.es goes crunching. Interestingly this takes about an hour, but then they have made a personal page for you. What you see is a page with stories which are linked to by your friends, or your friends’ friends. Where Feedly uses Google Reader shared item counts to rank news, Twittertim.es uses the number of times your friends posted something on their twitter accounts.
Another cool features is that you can view someone else’s page. Mine can be found on twittertim.es/tobiasverhoog. So you will not see a page with links by me there, but links from my twitter friends. Go to their homepage to also see a couple of example pages from some better known internet journalists such as Tim O’Reilly or Jeff Jarvis. You can also watch a video tour there.
Finally, pages by Media Sources and pages based on Twitter Lists are nice ways to explore more news sources. View a page of Wired or The New York Times or one based on links of the twitter list “Tech News People” curated by Robert Scoble. You don’t need to first make you own page to view these pages.
It’s clear that it’s very interesting to view news based on what your friends are reading and sharing on their twitter accounts. It’s funny that in the screenshot I just took for this article the piece on the new version of Digg is on top, because I think this is what news aggregators such as Digg and also Feedly need. Recommended news from your friends, added up by popularity and displayed in a convenient and clear way.
After have followed the keynote this week, the real insight and information about the new Apple iPad comes in the couple of days afterwards. Almost any blogger and her uncle have made a post with their thoughts on the iPad so why shouldn’t I.
Technological Perspective
There are two ways of looking at this new product. From a technical perspective it really is just a large iPhone or iPod Touch. It really doesn’t have any technical features over the iPhone. David Pogue, technology writer for the New York Times, introduced the three phases of a new Apple product category.
Phase 1 of the standard Apple new-category roll-out: months of feverish speculation and hype online, without any official indication by Apple that the product even exists.
Now Phase 2 can begin: the bashing by the bloggers who’ve never even tried it: “No physical keyboard!” “No removable battery!” “Way too expensive!” “Doesn’t multitask!” “No memory-card slot!”
That will last until the iPad actually goes on sale in April. Then, if history is any guide, Phase 3 will begin: positive reviews, people lining up to buy the thing, and the mysterious disappearance of the basher-bloggers.
The second way of looking at the iPad is not from a technical perspective but by looking at the possibilities of use. When I thought of a web tablet before the product launch, such as this Apple tablet or perhaps the CrunchPad (similar to the iPad but with only a browser) I couldn’t think of any reason the buy one when you already have a smartphone and laptop. Then I realized I own and love an iPod Touch and use that a lot. I use it for surfing, reading e-books and articles, twittering and games and of course use some other apps. I use it quite a lot at home, because it’s connected online via wifi and about the only place with available wifi that you can use is at home. So the only thing missing from my iTouch actually is 3G connectivity.
If you look at possibilities instead of shortcomings you see what Apple has created is really a clean “slate”. An empty vessel for developers of apps and websites to create content on. As heard quite often from tech pundits and journalists it’s the ideal content consumption device. E-books, e-magazines, videos, websites, music, it can all be consumed while comfortably sitting on a couch holding the sleek 700 gram device. Just look at what Sports Illustrated envisioned before the launch of iPad:
Comedian Stephen Fry, who was present at the keynote said the iPad had to be experienced to be judged fairly and that you’d be amazed by the speed and simplicity of the interface (link – it’s a long but good read, you can always spot the real writers between the bloggers). Below is a video of a demo where you can really see how beautiful it looks and how fast and responsive the graphical user interface is.
So if iPad is supposed to be a consumption device, an open playground for developers, then it’s especially disappointing it’s still a closed system. As Alex Payne writes the iPhone can get away with having a closed system where you can only install Apple approved apps and are not able to tinker with most of the settings, because it’s quite a step ahead from the older “smartphones” where it’s really difficult to install apps. A device between a smartphone and a laptop however can be much more open and “Apple’s decision to make the iPad a closed device is an artificial one”.
So I think Apple has shown us the future. I’m very interested to see if will be massively adopted like the iPhone or that for the average consumer there’s just no point in having an extra device. As @breun said: “It would be great if your iPhone turned into an iPad when you get home”. Regarding the openness, I’m waiting for the other device manufacturers to launch their tablets. Would be great to see a similar device with Android or even Chrome OS where you can install android apps and have the freedom of these operating systems.
The iPad does stimulate ones imagination about possibilities and the future of connectivity to the web and media consumption. Now let’s hope it also stimulates the imagination of the competitors. Are you already saving money for the first iPad or would you rather wait for a later version? Or don’t you feel the need for such a device or are you looking at other devices?
I’ve gone and tried to follow the Apple launching event yesterday. Robert Scoble posted earlier his reasons for not going while he had a ticket, mainly because he had way better access to the backchannel, video, photos and opinions from everyone who did go by staying home. Since I obviously had no possibility to be there I felt myself a little on par with him by following it online :-)
I started with firing up Seesmic Web, an online twitter client. I wanted to open some columns with my followers, some twitter lists of people who were going to be there and a search query on “Apple” or “Tablet”. Unfortunately the web app is quite the memory hog and my computer grinded to a full halt when I opened more than four columns. I then opened the same things in tabs of Firefox and that worked very smoothly. I also opened the live coverage of GDGT, Engadget and Gizmodo. GDGT had the fastest and most complete coverage (including images) and Gizmodo the funniest, so I soon dropped Engadget. Twitter was predicted by many to cave under the pressures of the event. Although this didn’t happen they did shut down the list features altogether, which was a real shame because now I had to miss out on local commentary. Best video and audio stream was provided by Leo Laporte’s TWiT.tv, but I found the website hard to reach and when I did manage to connect the video needed a lot of buffering and lacked in quality. I preferred the images of GDGT.
Alright, that sums up how I followed the event live. I’ll let you know what I thought of the iPad soon in a new post. I’m confident I didn’t miss out on any information during the keynote speech, getting my information from both GDGT and Gizmodo. To be perfectly honest I don’t think it really adds much to follow the event live, over reading about on blogs afterwards. One advantage is that you can place comments in perspective, but with Twitter’s lists down that didn’t work anyway. It does make sense if you just want to know everything first and it was a nice experiment to see how much information you can get online. Have you followed it online or do you think it doesn’t add anything to follow it real-time?
The following image is the information Twitter gives about the last tweet in this discussion.
As you can see, not so helpful. Below finally is an example from Friendfeed of how an conversation could be displayed. This makes it a lot easier for anyone to chime in.
Now the Android operating system which is inside my new phone (think of it as the Windows or Mac OS inside the phone, while it’s actually based on Linux) is like a marriage of the Nokia and the iPod Touch. It’s versatile, but user friendly. There are more things to figure out than with an iPhone which makes it more customizable, but also less easy to use. When you give it to someone less computer savvy (I call this the girlfriend test) she will pick up and figure out the iPhone a lot faster than the Android phone.
I’ve gone and tried to follow the Apple launching event yesterday. Robert Scoble