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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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Once upon a time, Wolfram Alpha tried to charge $50 for its iPhone app while, at the same time, offering a free iPhone-optimized mobile site. Then, the company shut down the mobile site of its "computational knowledge engine" altogether. Now, however, Wolfram is reversing this strategy and is not just bringing back a new and improved version of its mobile site , but the company also just announced that it will reduce the price of its iPhone app to $1.99 and will issue a refund to every customer who bought the app at the full price. Sponsor A New Policy for Wolfram Alpha According to Wolfram Alpha's newly minted managing director Barak Berkowitz, the team's "number-one priority as of today is to get Wolfram|Alpha in the hands of everyone." This, obviously, is a complete reversal of Wolfram's earlier policy, but we are very happy to see this new direction the team is taking. Refunds for Those Who Bought $50 App While Wolfram always argued that the app was worth $50, not too many people thought so. The current version only has 24 reviews in the App Store. Wolfram will obviously take a loss on the refunds as Apple won't return the 30% cut it took from all the sales, but the Wolfram Alpha team clearly feels that this is the right thing to do. We can only guess how much money Wolfram made from the $50 app, but chances are that the company will sell more than enough $1.99 apps to make up for the price difference. If you bought the app at the full price (or $19.99 during the holiday sale), you can go to this site and ask for a refund. To get a refund, users will have to supply their phone's or iPod touch's UDID, a screenshot of their UDID on the iTunes summary and account details page, as well a copy of their receipt from Apple. You can find our full review of the iPhone app here . New Mobile Site The new mobile site feels faster than the original page, but at least in the version we tested just before the official launch, result pages seemed to be formatted for a screen somewhat larger than the iPhone. We assume, however, that this is just a glitch and that the company will fix this shortly. Unlike the native app, the mobile site obviously also doesn't offer the specially formatted virtual keyboards for entering formulas (something Wolfram used as the main reason to charge extra for the iPhone app). More To Come According to today's announcement, the company also plans to expand on this strategy of making the service more accessible in the next few months, though the announcement didn't offer any further details. According to Schoeller Porter, Wolfram|Alpha's architect, "the new iPhone and iPod touch app price, and the refund offer are just the beginnings of a wider strategic move toward ubiquity." Discuss
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Wolfram Alpha Admits Mistake: Mobile Site is Back; iPhone App Down from $50 to $1.99
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Every one of our blog posts around here is like a delicate, magical snowflake that we nurture lovingly (if quickly) before we push it out the door into the harsh lonely world of the web. Many of them are well received (otherwise we couldn't do this for a living) but sometimes we write something we're really proud of and it just melts into the river of news without being read by as many people as we wished. Thus we present to you, our staff's hand-picked posts this week that we think you may have missed but would likely enjoy quite a bit: Sponsor Frederic Lardinois has been covering the e-book market closely for months. This week he wrote up... E-Books: After the Hype and Before the iPad The e-book hype reached its apex just before the holiday season. Now seems like a good time to take a closer look at the e-book market, especially given that this business is heading for another disruption once Apple's iPad launches. Richard MacManus has been focusing on an emerging trend called The Internet of Things. Check out this interview he put up at the end of last month: Everyware: Interview with Adam Greenfield, Part 1 Last week I had the privilege of meeting Adam Greenfield, author of Everyware: The Dawning Age of Ubiquitous Computing. It's one of my favorite books about the Internet of Things and is still ahead of the curve, even though it was written in 2005 and published in 2006. Greenfield was in my city Wellington for the week, so I sat down with him at a local cafe to get his views on the current state of Internet of Things and where it's headed. Sarah Perez lives in Florida and she's regularly got super smart content posted before the rest of us have even rolled out of bed in the morning. Her latest sleeper fave? Beyond Twitter Search: Semantic Analysis of the Real-Time Web Many of you probably never heard of the Ellerdale project until this week, when Twitter announced it was one of the company's new partners in receiving the "firehose" of Twitter data, a full feed stream of tweets that was, prior to Monday, only available to the major players like Yahoo!, Google and Microsoft. What Ellerdale is now doing with Twitter's 50 million tweets per day is definitely interesting - the service uses an intelligent data-parsing engine to analyze the context of tweets and the links they contain and combines that with other data sources like RSS feeds and Wikipedia to create a real-time search engine and trends tracker that provides more than just a list of tweets - it provides an understanding of the world's conversations. What would a new newsman say is news if a new newsman could say news was news? We asked Mike Melanson, our newest addition to the news writing team. He said his favorite under-read post this week was... Ads with Eyes: Keeping Digital Signage in Check While geolocation based services have been in the forefront of our minds lately, with websites like PleaseRobMe making us second guess announcing our whereabouts, another industry has been quietly ramping up its data collection practices. The Center for Democracy & Technology issued a report yesterday addressing the growing "digital signage" industry, suggesting a number of privacy practices it might adopt. Alex Williams helps make Enterprise tech news interesting and he posted some very important coverage of enterprise innovation this week in.... Will StatusNet Be Another Open-Source Star in the Enterprise? What a week for StatusNet, the open-source, microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, one of the first services to emerge as a focal player in the movement around the real-time Web. Last week, the company launched StatusNet Enterprise Network, a microblogging service with a support program for the corporate market. Initial customers include Motorola Corporation and Canonical Ltd. Kaliya Hamlin is a frequent guest contributor, events partner and friend of the family here at ReadWriteWeb. She wrote a great post this week titled... Bending the Identity Spectrum: Verifiable Anonymity at RSA Today at the RSA security conference in San Francisco, Microsoft's Corporate VP of Trustworthy Computing, Scott Charney, spoke - opening his talk with this question: "Do you want anonymity or accountability? YES!" But how can you have both? I created a spectrum of identity to help understand the different forms that exist on the internet. On one end is Anonymous Identity. Basically you use an account or identifier every time go to a Web site - no persistence, no way to connect the search you did last week with the one you did this week. Finally, my personal pick from my own archive. I've been having a great time writing up narrative tales of leading technology innovators. This is one you may not be familiar with but I think it's really a moving and important story. What Does it Mean to Make 5 Million Maps? Platial's Legacy It's not every day that a business shuts down but declares itself a success in helping kick off an unstoppable movement to change the world. Community mapping service Platial announced this week that it is turning off its servers and asking users to move their content onto the servers of other providers. Just short of 5 years old, Platial raised some venture capital, bought other small companies and made a name for itself, but in the end wasn't able to build a business. Co-founder Di-Ann Eisnor defiantly says that Platial changed the world anyway. Cartography used to be an elite practice of drawing borders around resources and power. Platial helped transform it into an accessible practice for millions of people to share how they have experienced the world around them. Those are our picks for this week! Come back daily for the best tech blog coverage we can provide. Snowflake photo CC by Flickr user YellowCloud Discuss
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7 Precious Snowflakes That Almost Melted Away (Our Favorite Low Profile Stories This Week)
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