iPad Evolution of Resolution

Today was the day so many of us knew would bring forth the next iPad from Apple. In some respects, it is just another iPad, but I am quite impressed with the technical specifications that have been announced. I can’t wait to get my hands on it! This may be the turning point for many new users of the iPad who previously were content with their desktop or laptop computer. I am a firm believer in the “post PC” era as described by Tim Cook in today’s brilliant keynote (watch the video here).

What to do with my current iPad? That answer is the same as what I had done with the iPad 1, iPhone, iPhone 3G, and iPhone 4. Gazelle.com has a very nice model for how to manage the transition of technology. They provide a guaranteed price and offer a very simple process to ship a product to them and receive a market-based payment for it. I especially like the feature that gives you get an extra 5% if you accept the payment in the form of a credit at Amazon.com. I will be receiving $304.50 for the iPad. It may be possible to do better on eBay but the convenience of Gazelle wins the day.

The price of the current iPad may drop fairly quickly as people get attracted to purchasing the newer technology. When will the rapid introduction of new products obsoleting predecessor products that still seem like new? The answer is not any time soon. The pace of technology is rapid and increasing. Consumers are the beneficiary and of course, it has made Apple the most valued company in the world.

The big picture is the transition to tablets. Today I read that a hospital in Canada has purchased 4,000 iPads for their physicians. There are so many applications where you have to “go to” your PC or laptop. With a mobile device such as the iPad or iPhone or any other of the rash of wannabes in the market, the Internet and the applications are where you are, not where your PC is. The updating of records of a patient in a hospital used to be by a chart on a clipboard filled out by the nurse. Much of that has moved to the PC or the laptop on a cart in the hall, or in some cases down the hall, not very close to the patient. The iPad can be with the nurse or physician and not only provide a way to enter the data, but also a way to show an x-ray with amazing clarity to the patient or a 3D model of their muscle and bone system enabling the physician to explain exactly what may be wrong and what will be done to correct it. The resolution of the new iPad is quite amazing and exceeds the ability of the human eye to discern pixels. The iPad displays 3.1 million of them — more than your HD TV. I can not imagine being a physician and not having one of the new iPads.

The laptop and desktop will not disappear because they are still quite useful for those who create information as opposed to those who consume information. Consuming information from a mobile device has changed the world and how we interact with information already — and we are still at the beginning. But someone has to create this content and most of that creation will be done on laptops and desktops as long as typing is involved. How long will that be the case? Talking to Siri on your iPhone is the beginning. Typing may become a thing of the past, but of course art work still requires paint and brushes — or does it? The WSJ reviewed a wide range of new styluses available for use with the iPad (Sketching Out a Future for the Stylus). The world is becoming digital at an increasing pace.

Tags: art, digital, Healthcare, ipad, iPhone, media, nurse, paint, paint brush, physician, radiology, siri, stylus

The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia

The first time I visited Slovakia, it was part of the former Communist nation. At the border crossing there were soldiers with machine guns. They rifled through our luggage and put a large mirror under the car to see if were attempting to bring something bad into the country. The country joined the European Union in 2004 and today, according to Business Week,  it is considered to be a high-income advanced economy with one of the fastest growth rates in the European Union A Bloomberg Businessweek story a few days ago described how a Bratislava company is organizing a national pay wall and has signed up the country’s top publications (See Online Media: The Great Pay Wall of Slovakia – BusinessWeek). This seems like a really good idea to me. U.S. publishers should pay attention. I am not suggesting a national paywall, by any means. But how about a business publications paywall, or maybe one for news, or for sports? The publsihers are fighting with Apple, Amazon, and others trying to preserve their models of the past. (I was really pleased to see Netflix stand up to Starz and not cave to the old model). The Slovakia model has subscribers paying roughly $4 per month (or $40 per year) to gain access to nine different publications. Publishers want us to pay $5 per copy for each of their magazines. Not going to happen. How about $5 per month for access to Businessweek, Forbes, Fortune, Wall Street Journal, Barrons, Smart Money, and the Harvard Business Review? I think millions would go for it. Nobody will read all the content of all these publications. Some will read all of one of them, others will read a little of each. The publishers will have to face the music at some point (no pun intended) or they will be disintermediated completely. I pay for WSJ and BW because I read them both cover to cover, but I won’t pay for the New York Times. I read the key stories they publish through the NYT blogs. The NYT gets no money from me. However, if there was a news paywall and for $5 per month I could have access to all the major news sources I would consider it. The NYT would get a slice of the $5 based on how many pageviews they got out of the total for the paywall offering. Another way for the NYT to get money from me would be for them to include their business section as part of the business publication paywall. The Slovakians are onto a really good approach. It takes cooperation from competing entities but I don’t see anything other than greed standing in the way. A tech company in Bratislava called Piano set up the infrastructure and promised nine publishers that they would not have to make any capital investment. Piano’s chief executive officer said it took a year of meetings to persuade the nine publications to get on board. Piano takes a 30% commission and the 70% gets split among the nine publishers proportionate to readership. I don’t know how they handled mobile devices, but clearly they should be included as part of the offering. Publishers, network operators, and platform providers including Apple et al want a share of the pie. Whatever they can work out is fine but from a consumer point of view, I think most of us would agree that what we want is simple. Pay once and read anytime, anywhere, on anything for an affordable fee for substantial content.

Tags: bratislava, media, paywall, publishers, slovakia

In The Clouds (Part 4)

The August issue of PC Magazine began the “magazine’s” 30th year and I have not missed an issue, although this is the first one I read on the iPad with Zinio. If someone had described the iPad to me back in 1981 it would have seemed like science fiction. Even the PC at that time seemed an amazing breakthrough. The first PC had a 5.25 inch diskette drive and no hard drive. Anybody have their archives on 5.25 inch diskettes?I hope not because it might be hard to find a drive to read them.

The First Word column by Lance Ulanoff over at PC Mag this month was called Storage Evolution in which Lance discusses how storage has evolved from one type of media to another. When a new size or type of storage is introduced it always seems that the new paradigm will last forever. In the grand scheme of things the evolution looks more like pings on a radar screen. They come and they go.  Sony has just made a decision to end production of the 3.5 inch disks. When the CD became popular for backing up our files it seemed to be the ultimate. Then came the DVD and then double sided and double depth. External drives, zip drives, USB keys, tape cartridges, and perhaps holographic storage soon. Getting the latest and greatest to backup your data is the easy part. What about five years from now when you want to restore some data from your archived storage? Will you have a PC or Mac that has a device that can read the storage medium you had chosen five years prior? Maybe and maybe not.

Why not let someone else worry about all this? There is something about clouds that brings the term into our daily lives. We say “it is a cloudy day”, or “there is not a cloud in the sky”, or if we feel especially elated or happy we might say “I feel like I am on cloud nine“.  More and more people are answering the question of where is there backed up data with “it’s in the cloud”. Some people worry about whether it will be safe and secure in the cloud but from my perspective it is important to compare the risk to that of keeping such data on your own computer. In fact I would say that the risk of your data getting compromised at a cloud backup service is less than the risk of your hard drive crashing or having your laptop stolen at Laguardia Airport, or at some point of being unable to read the data because the storage medium is incompatable with your computer.

Cloud services companies have a lot more at stake than we do when it comes to maintaining high integrity for their operations. They will keep your backup data backed up and they will use whatever the most cost-effective storage media is. As new kinds of media come along they will adopt it and migrate all your data to it. Their problem, not yours. The argument for using them is compelling from my point of view. There are many companies that offer backup services including Mozy, Carbonite, and SOS. See PC Magazine for a review. I have been using idrive.com for quite some time and have found it very reliable. The services can be setup to automaticaly make backups while you are sleeping. You can have the backups run daily, weekly, or even continuously so that whenever a file changes on your computer a backup is made in the cloud. The best part is that you don’t have to buy any devices and worry about how compatible they may be in the future.

Is cloud computing for businesses or for consumers? It is for people. Businesses do not buy from businesses. People in businesses buy from people in businesses. People work at businesses and people work at home. Some people are students and some are e-tired. Clouds are all about making people more productive and increasingly the clouds will be where we will keep all of our data that feel is important.

Other patrickWeb stories that refer to “clouds”

Tags: backup, backup service, cloud, cloud computing, cloud services, diskette, dvd, holographic, ipad, media, pc magazine, storage, storage medium, tape, usb