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On Saturday Apple let the public get their hands on their newest creation, the iPad , setting off a flood of hype and media coverage which has likely yet to reach its peak. Yes, this is yet another post about the iPad, and my apologies go to those who are tired of being choked by the frenzy of stories surrounding the iPad launch, but a few things I learned from this weekend might come in handy for undecided developers. Sponsor Personally I tried to avoid the iPad hype this weekend, and not because I'm not a fan of Apple products or because I have a specific disdain for the iPad; I tried, and failed, to avoid the hype because I believe I underestimated its potential impact. This is just part of the reason I believe any developer even contemplating the idea of making an iPad application should do it, and do it as quickly as possible . Here's why. There Aren't That Many iPad Specific Apps Yet When I first joined Facebook in 2004 it was still very small and very young and I could remember being able to page through the less than 100 groups that existed on the site. Then it was easy to either find a group you wanted to join or to create one and gain a large membership. Now, the network has hundreds of thousands, if not millions of groups and finding the ones you actually want is much harder. The iPhone has gone through this same process. When the App Store launched, only a few thousand applications were on it, making searching for apps easy and making the potential impact of new applications much larger. Now, as we know, hundreds of thousands of applications clog the App Store and make searching and discovering new applications exponentially harder than before. The same thing will happen to the iPad, which means now is the time to jump on the train. A current search of the App Store for iPad apps turns up just over 3,200 applications, a fraction of the number of iPhone/iPod Touch apps which will likely pass 200,000 later this year. While the iPad does run these other apps, there is a dearth of iPad apps, especially those that are not just scaled-up versions of their iPhone predecessor. The time has, obviously, never been better for app developers because right now with so few iPad apps, the probability of being discovered early is much higher. The Apple Buying Culture Wants Your App People don't love Apple for their low prices; they willingly hand over hundreds, if not thousands of dollars for the company's various products. The culture of the people who buy these products has taught them that price is not the main motivation behind why they buy something, while at the same time making them more willing to hand over their cash in micro-payments for individual games and applications. From the iPod to the iPhone, iTunes and the App Store have bred a new a customer willing to pay $1.99 for music, or $2.99 for an app they've never tried without hesitation. I know I've done it before, and I should feel worse about it but I don't. I've spent a few bucks here and there on applications that I used only a handful of times but I don't get angry about it. Honestly, my music purchases are much farther scrutinized than my app purchases. For better or worse, we've been taught to accept the throwing away of a few bucks here and there, and app developers have been cashing in on that for a while now. The other opportunity around this buying culture for the iPad is that people will likely pony up a few extra dollars for each app on average. While developing an iPad app may not be twice the effort it takes for an iPhone, the customer will likely be willing to pay $1.99 for an app that was $.99, especially just after launch. If I had an iPad right now, I'd want to test out the best applications on it, and some of those apps are likely to cost as much as $9.99, but I would likely still buy them because, hey, I just spent $500 on a device, what's a few extra bucks? The Hype Window Is Big, But Not Too Big The hype over the iPad has just begun, and it will only get bigger as more people discover what it can do and start being stared at by strangers on the subway. The hype will continue later when the 3G version of the iPad launches, though it will not be quite as large as this weekend's surge. The 3G launch will likely get the media buzzing about it again, and it will help the hype live longer than normal, however, that window of excitement could close this summer. New MacBooks and new iPhones are expected to be announced, if not launched, this summer, and they could likely steal a majority of the spotlight away from the iPad, especially if the mythological creature that is the "Verizon iPhone" does in fact become a reality. Apple will likely do everything in its power to keep the hype surrounding the iPad up until the holiday season when the company does its best business, by then, however, there will be a lot more iPad apps than there are right now. This Thing Is Likely Bigger Than Most Expected Originally analysts had estimated that between 200 and 300 thousand iPads would leave shelves this weekend, but Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray revised his guess to between 600 and 700 thousand after seeing the hoards of people waiting in line Saturday. Numbers aside, the impact of the device before its launch speaks volumes to its potential from here on out. Several media companies announced they would be developing special no-Flash sites specifically for iPad browsing, and others said they would be providing HTML 5 video capability in anticipation of the device. All the while, several outlets, like WIRED and the Wall Street Journal announced they were working on iPad applications for viewing their content. After Apple's past success with the App Store on the iPhone and iPod Touch, it's no surprise that these companies are jumping on board even before the iPad is in customers' hands; they recognized the importance of early adoption and being in the store at launch. Popular technology journalists have given mostly positive reviews of the device as it seems actually seeing, holding and using the device speaks louder than just reading, or hearing about it. Personally, I didn't think the launch would be this big, but it has certainly been another success for Steve Jobs and Apple. That being said, the reasons to develop on the iPad pile much higher than those not to, so if you're even considering it, do it. Do it now. Click here to see ReadWriteWeb's full coverage of the iPad's launch . Discuss
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Why You Need to Be Developing for the iPad Right Now
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The British novelist Ian McEwan said, "The naming of what is there is what is important." But there is a thing, or an idea, a system or network, that we live with every day, that we live in , that we, in point of fact, are , which has no name. When apprehending and recognizing something new, we humans name it. Some say we name things in order to control them and there might be some truth to that. But who would not elect to control an earthquake than be controlled by one? Our information gathering network has changed out of recognition, but its taxonomy has lagged behind. We need to name this new network, and we would like the readership of ReadWriteWeb to help us. Sponsor In the Big Room, our editorial chat room, we were speaking about the earthquake that struck Baja this afternoon. Before the media, even the new media, got it, we had read it on Twitter . ReadWriteWeb has written before on the ability of this new tool, and others like it, to gather and disseminate information. In the course of this discussion, we came to a surprising realization. Twitter was no more the issue than the so-called mainstream media was. We were beyond all of that now. Our network was not restricted to three news channels, or the cable news networks, or a handful of social media websites or thousands of Facebook accounts, or even all of those things taken as a whole. Our access to information, our ability to exchange it, was no longer bound by anything at all, with the possible exception of time. The reason for this sea-change is that we ourselves have in part become the system formerly we only used . We have become the fulcrum of our own network. Prometheus is well and truly unbound. This network, the one that connects us to virtually every part of the world, to every person on the globe, branches like a Mandelbrot set . It consists of computing devices from desktop computers to laptops to tablets to phones; it consists of every program written to run those devices, every website and service that helps us to process and move the truths we witness or create; it consists of cell towers and server farms; it consists of social media tools and word processing programs; but above all it consists of, it is powered by, human beings, both singularly and in aggregate, minds and mind. Our network is alive. But it needs a name, and we don't have one. Jokingly, one of us called it The Culture . It isn't. It isn't even a culture. Just a network. But a vast one, a possibly game-changing one and, above all, a nameless one, one which we should control rather than allow to control us. Help us assert control over an exciting, but daunting reality. What should this global network, this lace of machine and human, location, data and feeling, thought and thing, observer and observed, speaker and listener, be called? Discuss
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Our Network is Alive
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Andrew Keen is no stranger to controversy. He has irritated bloggers by equating Web 2.0 with communism and enraged citizen journalists with his best selling book, Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture . Naturally when I saw Keen's core conversation "Is Innovation Fair?" on the SXSW program, I knew it would incite lively discussion. Sponsor SXSW and the term "read-write web" are perhaps the antithesis of what Keen has become known for. While we as a publication (and often as a community) celebrate the participatory culture of Web 2.0, Keen sees the rise of amateur publishers as the fetishism of change-based culture and the breakdown of centralized moral authority. In less diplomatic circles, he's accused of being an elitist. When an intimate 40 person setting of bloggers like Stealthmode Partners' Francine Hardaway and legendary futurist Bruce Sterling failed to erupt into an angry mob, I was surprised. In addressing the question "Is Innovation Fair?" Keen maintains that there is no definitive answer. He says, "If you asked a peasant whether innovation was fair during the industrial revolution, he'd answer no. But history is written by innovators." Keen explains that the voices that have legitimized change from the industrial revolution to the late 60's, have been those of the cultural elite. Professional poets, musicians, academics and writers have always had a place in creating the histories surrounding major paradigm shifts. Nevertheless, as the digital revolution rapidly destroys the barriers to creating historical narratives, a new elitism has emerged in the form of a-list bloggers, social media experts and web developers. While digital utopians generally see technological innovations and social media as vehicles for democracy and positive solutions, Keen argues that the proponents of innovation tend to forget the victims of change. "Innovation doesn't lead to justice and fairness. I'd argue there is a more dramatic inequality now then there ever was during the industrial revolution. We have fetishized change, but we are unfettered. If anything, the new media is less transparent and less accountable...I don't have a problem with Twitter or new media, my problem is that digital utopians have dressed up their ideology to sound like democracy...Google has become the master of seeming like an altruistic and public company and yet laughing all the way to the bank." Keen argues that because established elites are being displaced by the digerati, the web ecosystem is suffering from a crisis in authority. He believes that a lack of thoughtful skepticism and the overwhelming emphasis on real-time sound bites rather than academic treatise is leading to the vast majority of netizens consuming only mulched versions of the truth. Says Keen, "You can't get nuggets of truth in 30 seconds on Twitter...Skepticism requires deep thinking. We have an increasing nihilism when it comes to traditional authority and yet few of the new authorities are doing the reading or groundwork. ...When we simply assume that all traditional structures are wrong, we risk the populism of a Sarah Palin..." As a blog with an audience of entrepreneurs, self-publishers and technologists, we know Keen won't hold you back from innovating. But he may make you question whether or not you have enough information to accurately assess your life decisions. Love him or loathe him, let us know your thoughts about Keen's assertions in the comments below. Discuss
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Is Innovation Fair? Andrew Keen Says No
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On March 15, at the prestigious Paley Center in New York City, a conversation will take place between Chinese digital activist and artist Ai Weiwei , Twitter co-founder and chairman Jack Dorsey , and yours truly Richard MacManus (ReadWriteWeb founder and editor in chief). The moderator will be Orville Schell , the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. The topic of the event is the emergence of digital activism for fostering positive social change. The onsite event is invitation only, but it will be live streamed exclusively on ReadWriteWeb on Monday, March 15, at 6:30 PM EST, from the Paley Center for Media, New York City. Sponsor The Central Question of the event is: what is the relevance of new social networking technologies in our culture and society; and how can we use these tools for digital activism in order to foster positive social change, particularly in China? You can start the discussion about it now on Twitter, using the hashtag #aiweiwei . We would also love to hear your thoughts on the topic via the comments here on ReadWriteWeb. To this end, shortly we will launch a special webpage that aggregates media and real-time conversation leading up to this event. Ai Weiwei and Digital Activism in China ReadWriteWeb has been actively covering events in China this year, in particular Google's struggle to effect change regarding censorship in China. So I'm personally thrilled to join the conversation with these 3 smart and influential people: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey and Orville Schell. Ai Weiwei is undoubtedly the star attraction. He is China's leading digital activist and a pioneer in the use of blogging and Twitter in China. He's also a renown international artist and architect. In the early 2000s, he collaborated with Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the famous "Bird's Nest" design of the National Stadium for the Beijing Olympics. Ai Weiwei later renounced that design as a "pretend smile" from the Chinese government. Here is a video that explains more about Ai Weiwei's art and digital activism: Further Details About the Event This historic event will be streamed live from the prestigious Paley Center for Media in New York City, enabling an audience of thousands around the world to view and listen - as well as participate in the discussion. The live conversation on stage will be shaped in part by the digital commentary around it, which itself is part of the ongoing global conversation about social media and social change. ReadWriteWeb is driving much of the online component of this event. Stay tuned for more details on that next week. Date: Monday, March 15, 2010 Time: 6:30 - 8 p.m. (Eastern Time) Venue: Paley Center for Media 25 E. 52nd Street New York, NY 10019-6129 Details About the Participants This information comes from the Paley Center website : Ai Weiwei is a conceptual artist, curator, architect, social commentator, and activist. He was born in 1957 into the domestic political exile of his father, the noted modernist poet Ai Qing. Ai Weiwei's birthright was simultaneously one of a cultural insider and a political outsider, and he quickly perceived the contradictions of his condition. Ai Weiwei's art has been shown in museums and galleries internationally. As a curator, he is known for cutting-edge exhibitions. In the early 2000s, he collaborated with the acclaimed Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the winning design for the National Stadium project for the Beijing Olympics, popularly known as the "Birds Nest," which he later renounced as a "pretend smile." Ai Weiwei has never sought foreign citizenship and maintains his credibility among a devoted Chinese following as a highly active blogger, with his finger on the pulse of modern China. Unafraid to spotlight injustices, he has documented the arbitrary conviction and swift execution of alleged cop-killer Yang Jia in Shanghai, investigated shoddy school construction in Sichuan, and led a movement to oppose the nationwide installation of Internet filtering software in new computers. He is critical of one-party rule and government corruption, as well as the nationalist tendencies of China's citizenry, which allow state power to go unchecked. As a result his blogs are shut down, his home studio is under surveillance, and he's had to have cranial surgery for injuries sustained during a recent altercation with local police in Sichuan. Jack Dorsey is the creator, cofounder, and chairman of Twitter, Inc. Originally from St. Louis, Jack's early fascination for mass-transit and how cities function led him to Manhattan and programming real-time messaging systems for couriers, taxis, and emergency vehicles. Throughout this work Jack witnessed thousands of workers in the field constantly updating where they were and what they were doing; Twitter is a constrained simplification designed for general usage and extended by the millions of people who make it their own every day. Jack is dedicated to creating public goods which foster approachability, immediacy, and transparency, and is starting a second company named Square focused on bringing these concepts to commerce. Richard MacManus is the founder and editor in chief of ReadWriteWeb, one of the most popular and influential technology blogs in the world. New Zealander MacManus founded ReadWriteWeb in 2003 and grew his blog about the evolving Internet into an international team of journalists. ReadWriteWeb is read by millions of thought leaders and consumers, and is syndicated daily by the New York Times. From the early days of blogging, social networks and YouTube to the future of machine learning, aggregate data analysis and other meta-trends, MacManus is widely recognized as a leader in articulating what's next in technology and what it means for society at large. Orville Schell is the director of the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York. He has written fourteen books, including nine on China, and is at work on an interpretation of the last one-hundred years of Chinese history. He was a Fellow at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the recipient of many prizes and fellowships, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Overseas Press Club Award, and the Harvard-Stanford Shorenstein Prize in Asian Journalism. Prior to assuming his position at Asia Society, he served as Dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley. Discuss
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Historic Conversation in NYC: Ai Weiwei, Jack Dorsey & Richard MacManus
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"The writing is on the wall that there will be baseline privacy legislation introduced," said John Morris, general counsel for the Center for Democracy & Technology at a Congressional hearing on location data and privacy yesterday. "It will require location be treated as sensitive data, like medical data. You'll need to do more than just post a disclosure statement." We're entering an era of location as platform but should that location data be as fundamentally private by default as medical information is? Sponsor Many users are concerned about their location being exposed in ways they don't control and that have adverse impacts on their safety and freedom. That's one side of the debate. These concerns could cause development of location based services to backfire, argues the Center for Democracy & Technology's Erica Newland in a blog post today : Location privacy is a timely issue here at the dawn of the location-enabled Web: ensuring that location information is subject to neither commercial nor government misuse - but is instead transmitted and accessed in a privacy-protective way - is essential to the long-term success of location-based applications and services. Beyond the risks to individualsʼ privacy, the present lack of privacy protection also creates market risks for the very companies seeking to capitalize on location services. That's well put, but does location data need to be default private like medical information in order to prevent misuse and to support an economy of innovation? Some people believe that it is the culture of sharing by default that makes location based services what they are. As one reader said in our Google Buzz chat on this topic : "people will never treat location like medical data, because they are so willing to give it up to the world in so many cases. It becomes an issue of surveillance vs. sousveillance." Sousveillance is outward-facing surveillance. Location based social networks offer not just a way for us to be seen, but a way for us to see what the rest of the world around us is doing. Checking in to a location is interesting not just so other people know you're there, but so you can see who else you know has been there as well and what they said about it. Of course exposure of your location is going to be opt-in on all of these services, but the locations you choose to check-in at ought to be public on some level so that interesting services can be built on top of them. See Gowalla's new API , for example, or our post What Twitter's New Geolocation API Makes Possible . Of course it would also be good to let users limit exposure of their location in certain situations to certain circles of friends. I might be happy to check-in at certain establishments if that was only made visible to a select group of my friends (not my family) and to other people checking in at that location, for example. But treating location data like medical data sounds like a recipe for shrouding it in complete privacy by default. Not allowing information about our activities in public... to be public...would be a real blow to the location service ecosystem. Photo: Samuri on a Cell Phone by Flickr user rumpleteaser. Discuss
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Location Data Sensitive Like Medical Information, Says Congressional Witness
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