If I accept conventional wisdom, Apple is getting into the TV-making business because:

The living room is the last consumer segment that Apple has yet to completely remake in its image.
Apple creates new markets where none exist, and it isn't satisfied with merely improving upon existing ones.
Steve Jobs allegedly said that he'd cracked the code for creating an integrated TV set.
If the iPad is really "just" a big iPod Touch, and has already sold 55 million units, then a TV that is "just" a big iPad could do gonzo business.
The business of making TVs is broken, and Apple has to fix it.
Cable and satellite providers are evil, and Apple has to liberate consumers.
Tim Cook "needs" a hit.

As I stated in my last post following Apple's gaudy earnings numbers, I don't accept conventional wisdom because conventional wisdom is dead! Apple killed it.

Most fundamentally, all assumptions about Apple seem to stem from a misunderstanding of how differently Apple thinks and operates from everyone else.

For starters, Apple doesn't chase markets just because they're there. Nor do they get sucked into market share battles just so they can say they sold the most units (see: iOS vs. Android).

Further, neither the aggrandizement of the CEO's ego nor the altruistic care-taking of the consumer drive Apple's product strategy.

Rather, Apple pursues markets purely and vigorously based upon a simple logic. Do they believe that their integrated hardware + software + service approach can be applied in a leveraged fashion to create a differentiated offering that delights consumers, appeals to the masses, and can be sold at high margins at a predictable run rate?

If the answer is "yes," then game on. If the answer is "no," then leave it as a hobby (such as the current Apple TV), or avoid the market altogether.

This is the backdrop for understanding the rumors about Apple building a new-fangled television set. Rumors and whispers notwithstanding, in the words of Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the obvious question is:

"Of each particular thing, ask: What is it in itself? What is its nature?"

Top layer = iOS devices; Middle layer = Core device functions; Bottom layer = Noteworthy hardware subsystems.

In the case of a serious living room play, if you check out the above graphic, what stands out most about the Apple TV in its current incarnation is its lack of apps, web, and communications support. These elements are the three biggest game changers that propelled the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad beyond the impressive media foundation that marked the pre-iOS iPod.

What is also lacking is the mainstream television programming (HBO, ESPN, ABC) that the typical consumer demands. A 'purdy' new TV doesn't remedy that problem, now does it?

But, remember, Apple is long removed from their anti-establishment days, whereby for the company to succeed the incumbent had to fail. Hence, the rebirth of the Mac was predicated on getting into bed with Microsoft; the rise of the iPod was predicated on getting into bed with the music industry; and the rise of the iPhone was predicated on getting into bed with mobile carriers.

When framed that way, who hasn't Apple gotten into bed with yet that they need to get in bed with to succeed in a mainstream way?

You guessed it; the cable and satellite providers. Why? Because as noted venture capitalist Bill Gurley sagely pointed out, "When it Comes to Television Content, Affiliate Fees Make the World Go 'Round."

In other words, for an Apple TV to be free-flowing with first-tier TV content in the same way that an iPod flows with first-tier music, Apple will need DIRECTV and/or Comcast to bless it.

ESPN, after all, earns $4.69 per subscriber household in affiliate fees on each and every cable subscriber. Apple's good friend, Disney, owns ESPN, ABC, Disney Channel and a slew of other channels. Disney simply isn't going to throw billions of dollars away in affiliate fees just so they can help Apple. All of the major TV content players view the world similarly.

So where does that get you when you connect the dots? I'll tell you where it doesn't get you ... to a television-like device that:

Is priced 2-4X the cost of an iPad.
Has sales cycles of one device every 5-10 years.
Has bad margins.
Has a serviceable form factor that for many people is good enough. (Apple challenges industries where the baseline experience is terrible. Television hardware wouldn't seem to qualify.)

Conversely, what if you could buy a set-top box that plugged into your modern, big-screen TV, and:

It just worked.
Had every channel you currently get on cable.
You could run those same channels as apps on your other iOS devices.
Your TV could be controlled by any of those same iOS devices.
You could upgrade to the newest version of the set-top box every 2-3 years (on a carrier-subsidized basis).

Who wouldn't buy this device? And why wouldn't the cable and satellite providers be all over this? After all, does anyone seriously like their set-top box?

As a sanity check, a carrier subsidy on a sub-$500 device is meaningful, whereas a carrier subsidy on a $1,500+ device like a TV set is nothing.

Wait! But, didn't Steve Jobs say that he'd like to make an integrated TV set?

Even if he did say that, do you really think that in his final official act as Apple spokesman, Jobs would telegraph to the world his company's grand intentions in the living room?

Related:

The magic adapter: Apple TV and the battle for the living room
It’s Time to ‘Think Different’ because Conventional Wisdom is Dead: Thoughts on Apple’s Q1 Earnings Call
Apple's Segmentation Strategy (and the Folly of Conventional Wisdom) 
Apple, TV and the Smart, Connected Living Room

Many newspapers and other traditional media entities still think of themselves as delivering their content in a specific package, although most are trying hard to build an online readership as well, or experiment with iPad and Facebook apps (not to mention paywalls). But few are thinking about their businesses in radically different ways — as content-generating engines with multiple delivery methods, or as platforms for data, around which other things can be built. USA Today  appears to be moving in this direction, by opening up its data for others to use and even commercialize, following in the footsteps of The Guardian and its ground-breaking “open platform.”

USA Today has had an API (an “application programming interface,” which allows outside developers and services to access its content) for some time now, as many other newspapers such as the New York Times  do. But like most of those other media outlets, the terms of the USA Today content API said it could only be used for personal or non-commercial uses, which meant the range of applications that could make use of the paper’s content was extremely limited. Now, the Nieman Journalism Lab notes that the newspaper has changed the terms of its API, and will allow commercial licensing of its data, with no rate limits or data caps for these “premium” licenses.

Opening up a relationship with outside developers
The paper’s APIs include one for all of its news articles, one for reviews of books, movies and other entertainment, and one for its census data — which is made up of public data, but has been collected by USA Today and made available in a more usable format than the original government version (although most of its APIs require non-commercial use, the New York Times allows commercial use of its government-info API, which is also made up of public data). Stephen Kurtz, VP of digital development at USA Today, told the Nieman Lab that most of the developers interested in using the paper’s APIs for commercial use are “mom-and-pop” shops, or a couple of guys in a garage, mashing up the content they get with other sources — such as combining USA Today movie reviews with data from Netflix. Said Kurtz:

We encourage that, and they give us good feedback of what they’d like to see and how they would like the API to grow. So for us, it’s very symbiotic.

This is a smart way to think of what an open API accomplishes. It’s not so much that it’s going to generate huge sums of money for a newspaper that offers it, but it allows for experimentation outside the traditional confines of the publication itself — and that can generate valuable ideas and feedback. For The Guardian, which launched its “open platform” approach last year, the opening up of its API was very much an extension of editor-in-chief Alan Rusbridger’s belief in what he calls a “mutualized newspaper,” one in which readers and those outside the publication help on both the journalistic side and the development side.

Those outside the paper have good ideas too

As Chris Thorpe, then the Guardian‘s developer advocate, described in an interview with me last year when the open platform launched, the paper’s API allows for access on several levels. One is the original free level, which allows anyone to use the data for personal or non-commercial purposes; the second is a commercial license, which allows developers to make use of the API provided they agree to accept advertising within the content; and the third is a “bespoke” arrangement, in which developers can request specific data and work with the paper to build a service or app — and then share in the revenue generated from it.

The British paper has been inviting outside developers to make use of its APIs through a series of “hack days,” and they have come up with some interesting ideas. For example, Thorpe has a prototype of a site he calls the “Later Today” Guardian: the site takes the newslists that the newspaper recently made public, which detail which stories it is working on for a particular day, and then maps them against the stories that the paper actually produces. Not only that, but it also notes which ones are in the process of being updated, so readers with useful information can contact the author via Twitter or email.

It’s great that newspapers like the New York Times have “labs” like Beta620, where their staff can experiment with different formats and services based around their content. But one of the driving forces behind the Guardian open platform was the idea that the paper itself couldn’t possibly think of or develop every interesting or worthwhile project involving its content — so why not “crowdsource” that effort via the API? That’s a worthwhile attitude that more traditional media outlets could benefit from. Embedded below is the video interview I did with Thorpe when the open platform launched.



Watch this video for free on GigaOM



Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Arvind Grover and George Kelly

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If the Internet is the public square of the 21st century, the Daily Dot wants to be its town crier. The newly launched online media startup is trying an experiment in community journalism, where the community is the web. It's an interesting vision, and one that looks to capitalize on the amount of time people are spending online.

The Daily Dot wants to tell stories through a mix of data journalism and old-fashioned reporting, where its journalists pick up the phone and chase down the who, what, when, where, how and why of a video, image or story that's burning up the social web. The site's beat writers, who are members of the communities they cover, watch what's happening on Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, YouTube, Tumblr and Etsy, and then cover the issues and people that matter to them.

Even if the newspaper metaphor has some flaws, this focus on original reporting could help distinguish the Daily Dot in a media landscape where attention and quality are both fleeting. In the hurly burly of the tech and new media blogosphere, picking up the phone to chase down a story is too often neglected.

There's something significant about that approach. Former VentureBeat editor Owen Thomas (@OwenThomas), the founding editor of the Daily Dot, has emphasized this angle in interviews with AdWeek and Forbes. Instead of mocking what people do online, as many mainstream media outlets have been doing for decades, the Daily Dot will tell their stories in the same way that a local newspaper might cover a country fair or concert. While Thomas was a well-known master of snark and satire during his tenure at Valleywag, in this context he's changed his style.

Where's the social data?

Whether or not this approach gains traction within the communities the Daily Dot covers remains to be seen. The Daily Dot was co-founded by Nova Spivack, former newspaper executive Nicholas White, and PR consultant Josh Jones-Dilworth, with a reported investment of some $600,000 from friends and family. White has written that he gave up the newspaper to save newspapering. Simply put, the Daily Dot is experimenting with covering the Internet in a way that most newspapers have failed to do.

"I trust that if we keep following people into the places where they gather to trade gossip, argue the issues, seek inspiration, and share lives, then we will also find communities in need of quality journalism," wrote White. "We will be carrying the tradition of local community-based journalism into the digital world, a professional coverage, practice and ethics coupled with the kind of local interaction and engagement required of a relevant and meaningful news source. Yet local to us means the digital communities that are today every bit as vibrant as those geographically defined localities."

To do that, they'll be tapping into an area that Spivack, a long-time technology entrepreneur, has been investing and writing about for years: data. Specifically, applying data journalism to mining and analyzing the social data from two of the web's most vibrant platforms: Tumblr and Reddit.

White himself is unequivocal about the necessity of data journalism in the new digital landscape, whether at the Daily Dot or beyond:

The Daily Dot may be going in this direction now because of our unique coverage area, but if this industry is to flourish in the 21st century, programming journalists should not remain unique. Data, just like the views of experts, men on the street, polls and participants, is a perspective on the world. And in the age of ATMs, automatic doors and customer loyalty cards, it's become just as ubiquitous. But the media isn't so good with data, with actual mathematics. Our stock-in-trade is the anecdote. Despite a complete lack of solid evidence, we've been telling people their cell phones will give them cancer. Our society ping-pongs between eating and not eating carbs, drinking too much coffee and not enough water, getting more Omega-3s — all on the basis of epidemiological research that is far, far, far from definitive. Most reporters do not know how to evaluate research studies, and so they report the authors' conclusions without any critical evaluation — and studies need critical evaluation.

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Marshall Kirkpatrick, a proponent and practitioner of data journalism, dug deep into how data journalism happens at the Daily Dot. While he's similarly unsure of whether the publication will be interesting to a large enough audience to sustain an advertising venture, the way that the Daily Dot is going about hunting down digital stories is notable. Kirkpatrick shared the details over at ReadWriteWeb:

In order to capture and analyze that data from sites like Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, Etsy and more (the team says it's indexing a new community about every six weeks), the Dot has partnered with the mathematicians at Ravel Data. Ravel uses 80Legs for unblockable crawling, then Hadoop, its own open source framework called GoldenOrb and then an Eigenvector centrality algorithm (similar to Pagerank) to index, analyze, rank and discover connections between millions of users across these social networks.

There are a couple of aspects of data journalism to consider here. One is supplementing the traditional "nose for news" that Daily Dot writers apply to finding stories. "The data really begins to serve as our editorial prosthetics of sorts, telling us where to look, with whom to speak, and giving us the basic groundwork of the communities that we can continue to prod in interesting ways and ask questions of," explained Doug Freeman, an associate at Daily Dot investor Josh Jones-Dilworth's PR firm, in an interview. In other words, the editors of the Daily Dot analyze social data to identify the community's best sources for stories and share them on a "Leaderboard" that — in beta — shows a ranked list of members of Tumblr and Reddit.

Another open question is how social data could help with the startup's revenue down the road. "Our data business is a way of creating and funding new value in this regard; we instigated structured crawls of all of the communities we will cover and will continue to do so as we expand into new places," said Freeman. "We started with Reddit (for data and editorial both) because it is small and has a lot of complex properties — a good test balloon. We've now completed data work with Tumblr and YouTube and are continuing." For each community, data provides a view of members, behaviors, and influence dynamics.

That data also relates to how the Daily Dot approaches marketing, branding and advertising. "It's essentially a to-do list of people we need to get reading the Dot, and a list of their behaviors," said Freeman. "From a brand [point of view], it's market and audience intelligence that we can leverage, with services alongside it. From an advertiser [point of view], this data gives resolution and insight that few other outlets can provide. It will get even more exciting over time as we start to tie Leaderboard data to user accounts and instigate CPA-based campaigns with bonuses and bounties for highly influential clicks."

Taken as a whole, what the Daily Dot is doing with social data and digital journalism feels new, or at least like a new evolution. We've seen Facebook and Twitter integration into major media sites, but not Reddit and Tumblr. It could be that the communities of these sites acting as "curation layers" for the web will produce excellent results in terms of popular content, though relevance could still be at issue. Whether this venture in data journalism is successful or not will depend upon it retaining the interest and loyalty of the communities it covers. What is clear, for now, is that the experiment will be fun to watch — cute LOL cats and all.

Related:

Data journalism, data tools, and the newsroom stack
The growing importance of data journalism
Before you interrogate data, you must tame it
Social data is an oracle waiting for a question

Amazon said on Wednesday that it will roll out a Kindle Lending Library later this year, which will allow users of the popular e-reader to borrow books from more than 11,000 libraries throughout the United States. While there are some interesting features included in this program — such as the ability to keep the notes you make while reading a borrowed e-book, and transfer them if you buy a copy — the offering also raises questions about who ultimately controls the content in those books, and what happens if Amazon or its publishing partners change their minds about the terms of the arrangement.

The news release from Amazon doesn’t say anything about the details of the program — for instance, whether there is a limit on how long the books can be borrowed for, and if so what it is (maybe libraries get to set the terms?). And it also doesn’t say whether Amazon or the publishers involved will have limits on how many times a library can lend a book.

That’s an important point, because some publishers have already begun to place arbitrary limits on the books they allow libraries to lend. HarperCollins, for example, recently capped its lending program at 26 loans, a limit many libraries and librarians were incensed about. HarperCollins argued that lending books more often than that would hurt its sales and damage the “e-book ecosystem,” saying in a statement:

We have serious concerns that our previous e-book policy, selling e-books to libraries in perpetuity, if left unchanged, would undermine the emerging e-book eco-system, hurt the growing e-book channel, place additional pressure on physical bookstores, and in the end lead to a decrease in book sales and royalties paid to authors.

in the wake of HarperCollins’ move, some libraries said they would no longer buy books from the publisher for their systems. “The library model has always been you purchase and own it for perpetuity, and I don’t think the format should matter as long as rights are being protected,” Joan Kuklinski of the Central/Western Massachusetts Automated Resource Sharing consortium told Library Journal. “No one tells a library they have to pull their books off the shelf after a certain number of circulations so why should this be different?” An excellent question.

Because e-books are digital rather than physical objects, publishers and distributors like Amazon have far more control over them than they used to, and in some cases, they’ve exerted that power in disturbing ways. In one infamous incident in 2009, Amazon actually yanked e-books from users’ devices electronically after the publisher changed its mind about offering a digital version — and to make the issues raised by the incident even more stark, the books it removed were George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm, both of which are about the capricious actions of totalitarian states.

More recently, Amazon used its control over its lending API — which third parties use to integrate their services with its offerings — to shut down a book-lending service called Lendle, which is designed to allow users to share books among themselves, something Amazon says it’s in favor of (within certain well-defined limits, of course). The company reinstated Lendle’s access after Lendle changed the terms of its service, but this kind of thing reinforces how much control Amazon has over the contents of the books users believe they have bought and paid for.

As more and more content has moved from the physical to the digital realm, book publishers (and music labels, and newspapers, etc.) have tried to perpetuate the control they used to have over the physical artifact, and in many cases have actually tried to create new forms of control they never had in the physical world. Whether — and how — Amazon and its partners choose to exert this over libraries and book-lending remains to be seen.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr users Marya and Timetrax23

Related content from GigaOM Pro (subscription req’d):
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jamiegau writes "Here we have a long and in-depth blog post analyzing the faults in Steve Jobs's Letter about Flash. The writer concludes with an interesting idea that it is all about online video."


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Firefox has thrown down the gauntlet in the race to take charge of your online identity, saying it will soon add identity management features to its browser, and hopes at some point to build recommendation services into the browser as well. The move pits the Mozilla Foundation and its open-source model against the proprietary approach taken by Facebook, which recently launched a series of features that it hopes will convince users and websites to use Facebook profiles as their default login for online services, and to implement the social network’s “Like” plugins as a universal standard.

The new addition to Firefox is called Account Manager, and it effectively transfers authority over logging in to various websites and services to the browser. Using a single menu in the main toolbar of the browser, next to the address field, Firefox will be able to log a user — or multiple users — into and out of multiple services, and will even be able to generate random passwords for users who don’t want to come up with their own. The service will apparently also support any standard for authentication such as OpenID (or presumably OAuth as well, which Facebook now supports), and is designed to be an open standard.

Firefox has effectively promoted the Account Manager plugin (or add-on, as it calls them now) from its Labs experimentation project to the official browser development stream. The add-on is available as a beta here, and after some testing and development will be added to the shipping version of the browser. The Firefox team said it is looking to “ship this feature as soon as possible,” and that adding support for it to an existing website or service should only take “as little as 15 minutes of hacking.”

It’s clear that Firefox sees the browser as the primary agent that stands between a user and the services and websites she wants to visit. That effectively means Firefox is going to go head-to-head with Facebook, which also wants to be the primary means by which users log in to websites and services. According to the Firefox blog, the Account Manager add-on is just part of a larger “online identity concept series” that Mozilla Labs has been working on, which includes looking at all the ways the browser can help users interact with the web:

Your Web browser, as your most trusted relationship in your life online, has nearly perfect knowledge of everything you do on the Web. We envision a world where your browser will play an even more active and critical role in helping you control and shape your online experience. To realize this vision, we need to increase the browser’s understanding of your online identity and provide a platform for building new capabilities that securely take advantage of this rich, dynamic set of data that represents the digital “you.”

According to Mozilla Labs, some of the ideas it’s working on include managing account information, but also questions such as “How can your browser help when you discover something cool on the Web that you want to share with your friends?” and also “What can your browser do to enable you to securely share data with websites and third-parties in return for context-rich Web experiences?” Those are both goals that will also bring the Firefox developer into direct competition with Facebook for access to user’s data and personalization or recommendation features.

Identity online seems to have gone from being a two-way race, with Google and Facebook, to being a three-way contest. May the best service win.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): There’s No Stopping Facebook

Interested in finding out what information Facebook is sharing about you through the company’s new open-graph API? Developer Ka-Ping Yee has come up with a simple tool that shows you everything the social network sends to anyone whose app or service decides to plug in to the new feature — all it requires is a user ID or user name. You can find out what information you’re sharing via your public profile by looking at your settings within Facebook,too, of course. But Yee’s tool shows you exactly what data a developer would get when it asks Facebook for info via the API, such as your name, birth date, location, etc. and also any public information such as your “likes” (formerly pages you were a “fan” of), your photos and so on.

As of yesterday, the tool was also showing some information that most users had not made public. Yee — a Canadian-born programmer who works for Google’s charitable arm, Google.org, and developed the “people finder” tool used after the Haiti earthquake — found that the API was showing what events he had recently attended, and even those he was planning to attend, information he didn’t recall giving Facebook access to (another developer says the old API provided this as well).

Thanks in part to Yee flagging the issue in a blog post and contacting the social network, Facebook now appears to have fixed it so that the API no longer makes this available by default (the developer says that his experiments with the Facebook API were the result of “personal dabbling” and don’t have anything to do with his work for Google).

Even though this glitch has been fixed, however, Yee’s tool has managed to surprise even some of the savviest tech users with what it reveals. Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr and Hunch.com, for example, on Twitter called it “immensely useful [and] potentially scary. I’m a sophisticated privacy vet & found things I hadn’t known I was sharing!”

Facebook has come under fire from a number of sources over privacy related to its new features, particularly the fact that users have been “opted in” to services such as “instant personalization,” which allows several sites that Facebook has partnered with to show users personalized content by drawing on their Facebook profile. Four senators sent the social network a letter today complaining about this kind of behavior, one of whom has also written a letter of complaint to the Federal Trade Commission.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Who Owns Your Data in the Cloud?

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user dirac3000

There has been plenty of talk about what Facebook would announce at the f8 conference this week, but the full magnitude of what the company has in mind didn’t really hit home until after the keynote by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a related presentation by Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor (Liz has a great overview of the issues here).

Both carried a single, unmistakable message: Facebook wants to own your activity on the Internet. Zuckerberg did his best to portray this as a great thing for users, but the corollary is inescapable: Facebook will be everywhere you are, watching what you do, keeping track of that data, and talking about what you’re doing to your friends and companies you “like.” A quick survey of the web shows that some seem to see this as a great idea (“Hey, I can show lots of cool stuff to my friends!”) and some are less enthusiastic (“Facebook is going to be following me and tracking my every movement!”).

The reaction from some observers on Twitter was positive. The LA Times said that it would “make sharing easier,” while Deborah Schultz of the Altimeter Group said, “A world that is more open and connected — always a good thing (despite some snarky comments); thanks FB for pushing open!!!” Her fellow Altimeter analyst Jeremiah Owyang was less enthused, however, describing it as Facebook’s “crusade of colonization.” The New York Times’s response was somewhat more tempered, calling it “Facebook to Go.”

Silicon Alley Insider called it a plan to “infiltrate the web,” and Silicon Beat said Facebook wants to “conquer the world.” Kevin Marks of BT, a former engineer with Technorati, said that “Facebook wants to replace links between sites with a database stored on their servers that they control access to,” and Eric Marcoullier (co-founder of Gnip and MyBlogLog) quipped: “Coldplay’s ‘when I ruled the world’ playing at F8. Interesting, if appropriate, choice.” Dan Gillmor of the Knight Center for Media Entrepreneurship summed it up by saying that “Facebook wants to be the Internet,” while Chris Dixon, co-founder of Hunch, said “we might look back at the 00’s as the golden age of the web, when we were ruled by Google, a benign dictator.”

As Liz has pointed out, the key to what Facebook wants to do is to control the hooks and tools that allow it to understand and participate in the social web, the “people-centered” web. By watching and indexing your “likes” and the likes of millions of others — Zuckerberg said that within 24 hours of his keynote, there would a billion “Like” buttons and plugins around the web — the company can create an incredibly powerful map of the relationships between people and their friends, and between people and the things they like, whether they are movies or bands or dishwashing detergent.

That’s a tremendous power to have, and the youthful CEO of Facebook makes it seem friendly and appealing. Why wouldn’t you want to share with your friends? But to use a popular phrase from Spider-Man, with great power comes great responsibility. Let’s hope Zuckerberg chooses to use his powers for good instead of evil.

Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Andrew Feinberg

Twiiter, at its first-ever developers conference — known as Chirp — which is being held in San Francisco had its co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams provided some hard numbers behind the growth and size of the social network. Here are some of the most important ones we’ve collected so far:

105,779,710 registered users

3 billion API calls a day

175 employees

600 million searches per day

300,000 new users per day

180 million unique visitors per month

37 percent of active users use Twitter on their phones

75 percent of traffic comes from outside Twitter.com

100,000 registered applications

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): As Twitter Develops, Developers Quiver in Fear

Thumbnail photo courtesy of Flickr user lrargerich

I don’t have an iPad, but watching this amazing video (embedded below) demonstrating the Alice in Wonderland app made me want to run out and get one — and if I had a young child, it would make me want to get one even faster. I know that many people believe reading should be a quiet and relaxing activity, and that there’s nothing quite like communing with the pages of a well-read classic, but this video makes reading “Alice in Wonderland” look like…well, it looks like a lot of fun. And I have a feeling if Charles Lutwidge Dodson (i.e., Lewis Carroll) could see his story represented like this, he would probably think it was kind of fun as well.




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The app comes from Atomic Antelope, which makes iPhone apps, including one called Bauble that lets you turn your iPhone into the world’s most expensive Christmas card. The Alice app brings an interactive element to the pages of this children’s classic, with features that are based on the original illustrations and allow readers to stretch Alice’s body when she comes to the table with the “Drink Me” bottle, to throw tarts at the Queen of Hearts and watch them bounce off her, and to rock the baby that turns into a pig. The app costs $8.99, although there’s also a free “lite” version. Chris Stevens, one half of Atomic Antelope, wrote about creating the app here.

So is this the future of e-books — every book its own app? It’s certainly a great example of the kind of full-color and interactivity and motion (using the accelerometer) that isn’t possible on other e-readers. These kinds of apps could certainly help the tablet app market hit the $8 billion-mark that GigaOM Pro analyst Mike Wolf forecast it would in a recent report on the sector (sub req’d). It’s also a sign of the creativity that traditional publishers seem to lack, as they try to maintain their traditional stranglehold on book prices in the online world, as Paul Sweeting detailed in this recent GigaOM Pro analysis. Now I’m trying to imagine what a Dr. Seuss book would look like as an iPad app.

Windows and Mac: Miro Video Converter quickly and easily converts video on-the-fly for popular devices, with presets for your PSP, Android phone, or Apple device. More »

Craigslist founder Craig Newmark says that he believes social networking and the rise of distributed trust and reputation networks are helping to shift the balance of power in society, away from those with nominal power and money and towards people who emerge from the grassroots. Although personal social networks are relatively small in real life, unless someone is a celebrity or a politician, Newmark says that social networking allows online networks to be much larger and much more powerful by comparison.

While distributed trust systems are just emerging through services such as Facebook and LinkedIn and new ventures such as Unvarnished , the Craigslist founder says the potential implications of such networks are significant.

By the end of this decade, power and influence will shift largely to those people with the best reputations and trust networks, from people with money and nominal power. That is, peer networks will confer legitimacy on people emerging from the grassroots. This shift is already happening, gradually creating a new power and influence equilibrium with new checks and balances. It will seem dramatic when its tipping point occurs, even though we’re living through it now.

Newmark also says in his post — which he is discussing in a live-streamed talk this morning at the Reynolds Journalism Institute — that he sees the need for reputation networks that can manage the distributed identities and trust information of people online, just as banks manage money.

The repositories of trust information are the banks in which we store this big asset. Like any banks, having a lot of this kind of currency confers a lot of power in them. Having some competition provides some checks and balances. We need to be able to move around the currency of trust, whatever that turns out to be, like we move money from one bank to another. That suggests the need for interchange standards, and ethical standards that require the release of that information when requested.

Newmark’s blog post expands on ideas he raised when I had coffee with him recently at his favorite cafe in San Francisco, where I shot a short video embedded below. At the time, he said that managing trust and reputation online was “the next big problem for the web,” and called some form of distributed trust system “the killingest of killer apps.”

Newmark suggested that big players such as Google, Facebook and Amazon were the kinds of entities that would have the scale to handle such a distributed trust or reputation-management network, and said that despite some occasional missteps by both Google and Facebook when it came to privacy (Google Buzz and Facebook Beacon, respectively), he believed that both were acting in good faith and had a policy of “not being evil.”

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): Can Enterprise Privacy Survive Social Networking?

With the launch of the Apple iPad just days away, magazine and newspaper companies are putting the finishing touches on their apps for the tablet, hoping to lure both new and existing readers to this new format of multimedia device, and possibly even get them to (gasp!) pay for digital content. As the Wall Street Journal has described, magazine publishers are falling all over themselves to create iPad apps, in part because advertisers are eager to get on the device, and also because a comScore survey showed that a surprisingly large number of potential iPad buyers were actually interested in paying for content on it. So what would you most like to read on the iPad? Take our poll, which is embedded below, or leave your thoughts in the comments:


View This Pollsurveys


Magazine giant Conde Nast has apps for Wired, GQ, Vanity Fair, Glamour and The New Yorker in the works, and others to come soon. But probably the most eagerly awaited magazine in that group is Wired, which showed off its iPad prototype at the TED conference.

VIV magazine also came up with a prototype of an interactive feature spread, as described in the New York Times Bits blog:

And one designer came up with a mockup of what a magazine cover could look like on a multimedia device like the iPad, as described at TUAW:

Whether the iPad will in fact be a game-changer for the media industry remains to be seen, but even Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons has changed his mind as to whether he wants one or not — although former Engadget editor-in-chief Ryan Block says the iPad probably won’t change your life. Meanwhile, GigaOM Pro research analyst Michael Wolf estimated in a recent report (subscription required) that the launch of the Apple device could kickstart an $8 billion tablet app market (that report is just one of several iPad-related GigaOM Pro reports you can find here).

Apple initially named five of the top six major publishers as launch partners for its iBookstore for the iPad. More recently, we heard that two independent publishers had signed deals to provide e-books and that Apple plans to offer free public domain titles from Project Gutenberg. Now, self-published authors will also get a crack at the iBookstore via deals Apple has struck with e-book publishing services Smashwords and Lulu.

Smashwords and Lulu are for e-books what TuneCore is for music. TuneCore will take your CD (or indie film) and upload it to the iTunes Store for a flat fee, eliminating the need to jump through all the hoops necessary to set up an account directly with Apple. All the royalties earned on sales of the album and individual tracks are then forwarded to the artist.





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